calming the waters

towards a reconciliation of religious people with scientific atheists
with a massive debt of gratitude to Alan Watts, specifically for his book
The Supreme Identity: Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion.

Introduction

The battle between scientific atheists and religious people – henceforth to be known as the God Wars – is fraught with misunderstanding on both sides. Not only do the proponents of each position usually misunderstand the position of the other, being inclined to read only the most affirming literature of their own camp and review only the least intelligent literature from the other, but they often misunderstand their own as well. This is as true of scientific atheists as it is of religious people, although in the case of the religious it is arguably more tragic. The result of this mutual misunderstanding is an image of ignorant armies clashing by night, and since both armies are emotionally partial to their own position (as well as sometimes possessing a merely partial understanding of it) there seems very little hope for consensus or resolution.

As a scientific and religious atheist, I sympathise with each position while remaining emotionally unattached to either. My understanding of each side is incomplete and imperfect, especially regarding Christianity, but sufficient to afford me the understanding that the conflict between them – at least insofar as it concerns metaphysics and religious belief – is mostly wrong-headed. (In the political sphere, however, the argument has practical relevance, and here it is all the more important that religious people understand the logic of metaphysic as distinct from the metaphor of religion, and temper their evangelism accordingly.)

How do the parties to the conflict err? Religious apologists err mostly by confusion, when they conflate their religious metaphors with a metaphysic whose nuances they do not understand, quote scripture by way of argument, evangelise with dogma before compassion, or wade into the impossible territory of proving God’s existence with logic. Scientific atheists err mostly by inflation, when they admit no strict theoretical limits to science, fail to recognise the faiths inherent in a scientific world-view, or deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the rational and the empirical. These are the main respects in which, I feel, those who cleave to a position must increase their own understanding of that position as well as the ‘opposing’ one.

And both science and religion tend towards a kind of fundamentalism. Modern-day ‘followers of science’ tend to give it some of the characteristics of a creed, and it is probably unnecessary to elucidate the ways in which religious dogma assumes absolute rather than relative truth for some of its own followers.

My main motivation for writing this is the distress and frustration I feel in witnessing the angst, anger and confusion felt by participants in this conflict, especially since I believe the conflict is largely unnecessary. I hope to engage with all parties to this conflict in an intelligent and critical conversation that will at least partially assuage their mutual dissatisfaction.

Framing the Conflict

The largest questions in the battle between atheists and the religious include: whether God exists or not; the value of religion to humanity; the political relationship between church and state; and the debate between evolutionists and their religious opponents, the latter an apparently unnecessary debate which seems undying despite having been effectively concluded long ago: evolution happens.

I don’t intend to address these questions by turn, which would merely add my voice to the clamour and go no way towards quieting it. What I intend is a broad philosophical exploration of science, metaphysic and religion. Hopefully I will be able to explain some insights on topical questions at opportune moments along the way, and later I might be able to address specific unresolved questions from both sides in the God Wars.

I have said that when scientific atheists err it is usually by inflation, by which I mean they believe science can do more than it actually can. In my view, errant scientific atheists in the God wars either admit no strict theoretical limits to science, or fail to recognise the faiths inherent in a scientific world-view, or deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the rational and the empirical. These failures lead them to overestimate the capacity of science to answer all questions, resulting in an overzealous flying of the scientific flag and a corresponding attitude of intolerance and dismissal to alternative models of explanation.

This attitude is recognised by many as analogous to the arrogance and intolerance of religious fundamentalism. That some religious people are hopelessly dogmatic needs no elaboration. But the intolerance of the religious fundamentalist and the arrogance of the scientific fundamentalist are in many ways counterparts. The scientist, however, suggests that his apparent arrogance is actually a confidence justified by a wealth of scientific evidence. Scientific evidence is based on methodical observation and repeated testing, and compared to it the unobservable and scientifically untestable ‘hypotheses’ of religion are flimsy indeed. The common religious man is affronted by this, the scientist remains incredulous, and the confused argument continues apace.

The factors allowing this debate to continue are at least twofold. The first factor is the privacy of religious experience. In gathering empirical, objective knowledge, science is limited to third-person, repeatable observations. Religious experience (or, to be precise, the metaphysical realisation that is later codified in terms of religious experience) is first-person and unrepeatable, and therefore permanently inaccessible to science – except insofar as it can be represented by analogy as neuronal firings. This process is akin to reading a Wordsworth poem on your computer in the form of the 1s and 0s in the hard drive; the bits themselves neither constitute nor represent the poem, let alone convey the intensity of its meaning. But since intensity of meaning – experience per se – cannot be quantified, observed and tested, it does not constitute empirical evidence and is scientifically invalid. (In fact, scientists feel compelled to explain mind as an epiphenomenon, or less, of matter, but experience the same pitfalls as those who try to explain matter as an epiphenomenon of mind.) The scientist and the religious person feel at loggerheads, but actually their views are perpendicular. Like two vehicles proceeding at right angles, they could continue peacefully on their respective courses, but their ignorance – or their need to perpetuate their views – causes them to clash.

The second factor perpetuating the clash is a specific and entirely forgiveable ignorance that concerns the necessary exegesis in metaphorical terms – which is the creation of religion – out of the ineffable experience of metaphysical realisation. This is generally more problematic for the Western mind, so I’ll deal with it in its own sub-heading.

There may be other factors contributing to the God Wars’ longevity, but these are the main ones I can think of: that science is compelled either to deny ‘religious experience’ or reduce it to an observable analogue that is rightly unacceptable to the religious; and that religious metaphor is routinely taken for the truth itself rather than understood correctly as a metaphor for the infinite.

Metaphysicalstyle

The metaphysical realisation of the infinite is the true beginning (as in the origin) and the true end (as in the goal) of all religion. The beatific visions of the saints, the realisations of mystics and of ordinary people are experiences of the ineffable infinite which religion, or any other system, can describe only by metaphor. The second ignorance that allows the God Wars such egregious longevity is the tendency of religious people as well as scientists to confuse religious metaphors with the ineffable truth – the infinite – to which they point.

Now the Western mind, whether religious or not, is uneasy with talk of the infinite. We are accustomed to gradual, rational exposition and are reluctant to accept ‘immediate certainties’ or ponder the truly metaphysical. Especially when this is declared from the start to be paradoxical to language and inaccessible to thought except by metaphor, it is easier to dismiss such territory as mere nonsense and return to the study of charmed quarks. But this is precisely the territory one must explore if one is serious about life, or if one wishes to engage with religion in a sincere way, regardless of whether one’s intentions for this engagement are that it should be sympathetic or hostile.

There is no place from which to begin to understand the infinite except the infinite itself. This may be inconvenient, but one cannot work up to the subject by easy stages. Almost all writings about the infinite plunge straight into the heart of their topic without preface, apology or introduction (and this unanimity might be surprising to some sceptics whose understanding of religion has been more or less superficial) but all do so by metaphor, whether personification as “the Lord” or abstraction as “OM” or “the Tao”:

“In the heart of all things, of whatever there is in the universe, dwells the Lord. He alone is the reality. Wherefore, renouncing vain appearances, rejoice in him.”
- Isha Upanishad

“The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.”
- Tao Te Ching

“OM. This eternal Word: what was, what is and what shall be, and what beyond is in eternity. All is OM.”
- Mandukya Upanishad

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
- St John, I

In the infinite we are dealing with something that has no beginning and no end, and to explore it there is no finite point of reference from which to begin. We must therefore begin with the infinite itself, and try to understand as clearly as possible what the word means. Almost invariably our imagination tries to grasp the infinite in terms of a boundless expansion of space or an indefinite duration of time. In spatial terms, it is perhaps that which expands outwards forever or contracts inwards forever. In temporal terms it is an unending time series or perhaps an “ever-diminishing point of time called the moment” (Alan Watts, The Supreme Identity: Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion, 1950). In terms of consciousness it is an indefinably vast mass of sentiency; in terms of power a potential so vast as to make the explosion of every atom in the universe mere firecrackers.

“But expand, prolong, magnify and multiply as we may, we are not one fraction nearer to the true infinite than when we began, for the terms of time and space [or anything else] are not applicable to the infinite” (Watts). One million to the power of one million is no closer to strict infinity than one. So instead of trying to multiply our way to infinity, we might denote the infinite by outlining it in the limitations of space and time, as the sizeless, the spaceless or the timeless. We could say that the infinite exists in its entirety at every point of space. “Or, to put it in another way, from the standpoint of the infinite every point of space is absolutely here, for there is not a different infinite in every place. In yet another way, we can say that there is no space or distance between the whole infinite and anything at all” (Watts). Or, in terms of time, that from the standpoint of the infinite, every moment of time, past, present and future, is absolutely now. As the infinite must always be described paradoxically, a not altogether terrible description is that the infinite is that circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

That there is no finite point from which to explore or work up to the infinite, the scientist and the philosopher regard as a hopeless position, for to adopt the existence of the infinite, or God, as one’s major premise contradicts the rules of logic. But there is no alternative, for “as the reality of light cannot be proved or described in terms of visible shape, the reality of the infinite cannot be proved in terms of the finite. … Logic… may travel backwards in time from effect to cause, effect to cause, but as long as it stays in time it cannot touch the eternal… The most that can be said is that finite contingencies suggest the infinite; in no sense can they be said to prove it.” (Watts)

By way of encouragement to the logician, a parallel to this situation is available in ordinary experience. All knowledge must begin with oneself; it must assume a knower as base of knowledge. But no objective proof of the knower’s existence will ever be forthcoming, for the knower can never be the subject of its own knowledge, so its existence can never be objectively proved. Objective knowledge suggests a knower as the finite suggests the infinite; neither proves what it suggests. Nor can the infinite be described in terms of anything finite, as the knower cannot be described by anything known. Neither long nor short, white nor black, hot nor cold – the knower transcends all the objects of its knowledge as the infinite transcends the finite. “But as the infinite is the ground of the finite, the knower is the ground of knowledge; apart from the knower, or at least the knowing process, nothing whatsoever would exist from the standpoint of knowledge.” (Watts)

The philosopher’s intuitive knowledge of a knower may not be objective nor proven, but it is something much better. Objective knowledge is mediate and relative, but subjective experience is immediate; the knower is as absolute and certain as anything in the realm of science or philosophy. In the same way, for metaphysic the infinite is the certain and irreducible ground of everything finite and is known immediately as distinct from objectively. Since both proof and doubt can refer only to objective things, the infinite is accessible to neither. As ultimate Reality, there is no external standpoint from which to doubt it or to prove it.

One may well respond: “We have intuitive experience of our own knower-ness and are prepared to call it immediate and irreducible, but we have no such experience of the ultimate Reality. How can we accept it as our starting point?” The answer is that, in principle, the knower and Reality are the same, all knowledge being partial participation in infinite knowledge – a metaphor that does not reduce the infinite to only meta-knowledge or ‘cosmic consciousness’, but merely follows from the fact that since it manifests limited knowledge, the infinite contains the possibility of all knowledge, infinite knowledge. As the infinite, Reality ‘generates’ reality by limiting itself in apparently multiple finitudes. (And the interconnectedness of these finitudes points, similarly, without proving anything, to an underlying or transcending order.)

It is possible to go extraordinarily deep into this topic but now, with heartfelt thanks to Alan Watts (and obeisances to his publishers) I would like to leave aside the idea of the infinite. I have merely set before you the impossibility of proving or disproving it, but even describing it is like trying to describe a mirror in terms of the colours and shapes it reflects, yet as the mirror is the indispensable source of the images it reflects, the infinite is the indispensable ground of being and knowledge.

So, with relevance to the God Wars: if God is understood to mean the infinite, God is beyond proof or falsification. Firstly, then, for goodness’ sake stop arguing about whether God exists. To regard the existence of the infinite, or of God, as being of the same order as the existence of anything else you can think (such as a flying spaghetti monster or a pink teapot orbiting Mars) is to miss the point. God is not posited in this way to begin with.

Secondly, I have a message for religious fundamentalists.

God is Your Metaphor

Religion is knowledge of the infinite in terms of analogy. Whereas the metaphysical realisation is immediate, subjective and direct, “the religious mode of knowledge is mediate, objective and analogical, and does not claim to be anything else.” (Watts) Correctly understood, Christian theology is a well developed doctrine that in no way contradicts itself or a non-dual metaphysic of the infinite. Only a superficial understanding of Christian theology (one which does not understand it as a metaphor for the infinite but as an absolutely literal doctrine – and just as many if not more Christians err in this regard as do religious sceptics) could regard it as logically untenable or naïve. Such a view is the valid conclusion of an invalid method employed by an investigator lacking one crucial piece of the puzzle, like the congenitally blind man who knows sunlight only by its warmth or someone who insists on evaluating apples by their physical dimensions and not by their taste.

Despite the ineffability of the infinite, it is necessary to develop religion. One cannot hang around in metaphysical la-la land and say nothing whatsoever about the infinite if one’s goal is to realise it. It is necessary to generate a knowledge of the infinite in terms of what is accessible to mankind: reason, feeling and sense. One must employ an image for the infinite. And there are three kinds of image (this borrowed, once again, from Alan Watts):

• Rational images or ideas: forms seen in the mind’s eye (which is the strict meaning of “idea”). “Metaphysical doctrines are not ideas in this sense, for the mind is incapable of forming any image of the eternal… The mind can conceive the eternal as everlasting time, but this is analogy pure and simple.” (Watts) Everlasting time and indefinite duration are not ideas of eternity, because time and duration are relative concepts of temporality, whereas to the eternal all moments are present – the strictly eternal is ‘timeless’. The mind can only think about the truly eternal negatively, so it must employ ideas.

• Feeling images or values. “In order to relate the infinite to man’s feeling nature, it must be clothed in some emotionally moving analogy.” (Watts) A ‘non-idea’ like the Eternal or the Absolute lacks the feeling value that attaches to ideas like God, the Divine Love, or the Everlasting Father.

• Sense images or sacraments. “For the original apostles, Christ Himself would have come… under this category, being the Eternal Word made flesh. To Christians of later times the Incarnate Word is sensed indirectly in the sacraments.” (Watts)

Thus religion incarnates or projects the ultimate reality in creed, in code (values) and in cult, so as to be meaningful and effective for the whole of mankind’s nature.

Why does Christianity not speak of the metaphysic of the infinite? And why should Christians not be outraged at this apparent reduction of their faith to a kind of second-rate metaphor for something completely nonsensical? The answer is that the purpose of Christianity is salvation, which is analogous to but, relatively speaking, distinct from metaphysical realisation (although the path of some Christian saints or mystics may very well involve both) and we live in the realm of the relative.

“Now the Church, as such, is not concerned with metaphysic. The nature of the Church is sacramental. That is to say, it is a concrete and positive form of creed, code and cult, which has its own proper function of representing the spiritual by analogy, and in physical terms. Thus it is quite beyond the design and nature of the church to employ the negative speech of metaphysical doctrine, or to deal in any way with immediate as distinct from mediate and analogical knowledge.” (Watts)

Christianity is concerned with the person as a temporal being; metaphysic is concerned with man as an eternal being. In the same way that the infinite is not opposed to the finite but finds its perfect expression therein, there is no conflict between metaphysic and the Church but the latter expresses the former, and each is perfected by the other.

Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth-century Syrian monk, “distinguished between the kataphatic and apophatic means of knowing God, which are equivalent to the religious and the metaphysical. Kataphasis is the description of God in terms of created nature… Apophasis is the negative description, the subject of [Dionysius's] Mystical Theology, whose final chapter might have been taken bodily from the Upanishads or Shankara.” (Watts)

“Going yet higher, we say that [God] is neither a soul, nor a mind, nor an object of knowledge… neither is he reason, nor thought, nor is he utterable or knowable; neither is he number, order, greatness, littleness, equality, inequality, likeness, nor unlikeness; neither does he stand or move, nor is he quiescent; neither has he power, nor is power, nor light; neither does he live, nor is life; neither is he being, nor everlastingness, nor time… nor wisdom, nor one, nor oneness, nor divinity, nor goodness… nor any other thing known to us or any other creature” (Theologica Mystica, V., a chapter entitled “That he partakes not of intelligible things who is pre-eminently their maker”)

The Mandukya Upanishad, mentioned by Watts, elucidates:

“The infinite consciousness is not that which is conscious of the subjective, nor that which is conscious of the objective, nor that which is conscious of both, nor that which is simple consciousness, nor that which is a mass all sentiency, nor that which is all darkness. It is unseen, transcendent, unapprehensible, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable, the sole essence of the consciousness of Self, the negative of all illusion.”

Now, briefly, regarding the attributes of God, it should be easily understood that the Christian God is omniscient and omnipotent because (in the crudest language of the least realised person, your author) the infinite ‘contains’ all viewpoints and all possibilities. It is everywhere and does everything. God is understood as Creator because all finite and temporary being has its ground in the infinite. And so forth.

I think I have devoted enough copy to the task of ‘explaining religion’ and I hope I have not failed too dismally in that task. Actually I am more or less unqualified to do this, so I hope I haven’t merely created more confusion. At the very least, I hope it has given some superficially anti-religious viewpoints pause to consider that their enemy may be deeper and, perhaps, more credible than they had imagined, if not less inscrutable.

By way of further specification, it is obvious that many religious people are also entirely dogmatic and impervious to reason as well as experience. People are fragile and fallible; brainwashing is alive and well in religion as elsewhere, and dogmatic indoctrination is an extremely dangerous trend, especially when a church aspires to statehood or dogma subverts reason to political ends. In some senses, then, the God Wars must rightly continue. But contrary to many scientific atheists’ beliefs, religion does not necessitate brainwashing, and God is not only for suckers.

On to Science

I’ve said that scientific atheists err mostly by inflation, when they admit no strict theoretical limits to science, fail to recognise the faiths inherent in a scientific world-view, or deny the possibility of knowledge beyond the rational and the empirical. So the question to ask is what parts of reality are off-limits to science.

As a disclaimer I can only hope is unnecessary, I want to state briefly that although I think followers of science sometimes overreach themselves, I am not antipathetic to science. I thrilled to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker before being massively disappointed by The God Delusion, where he overreached himself and let his tone change from that of a masterly and companionable guide exploring the fascinating intricacies of biology to a shrill and disdainful preacher from the pulpit of an ill-considered dogmatism. Science has produced wonderful benefits for humankind, along with some terrible dangers, and the validity and efficacy of its methods, within its field, is not to be denied. But its field is limited nonetheless.

I’ve pointed out that the scientific method can only deal with third-person observable phenomena, so it cannot directly investigate experience as such. Science can also not deal with the once-off incident, or the ‘miracle’, because its method relies upon repeatable experiments. The question of Christ’s resurrection, for instance, as a once-off event, is not accessible to scientific investigation. The most a scientist can do is furnish opinions, never evidence, and even then his opinions would not come in his capacity as a scientist but as a philosopher. In fact the resurrection would not even have been a question for science if there had been scientists at Golgotha, for they would not have been able to repeat the experiment.

A Christian would be ill-advised to put too much stock in this point, because as historical dogma the question of the resurrection is, of course, just as inaccessible to him as it is to the scientist. The Christian believes it on faith; the scientific atheist disbelieves it on faith. The point nevertheless remains that science as a creed (and in the eyes of many of its followers it does tend to be a creed) ‘averages out’ the world into a kind of consensus reality. Science must ignore, deny or explain away unrepeatable phenomena, but it remains a great arrogance for a school that deals only with the necessarily commonplace or repeatable to suggest that very rare phenomena do not occur or are impossible.

What Life Is For

“Although the phrase ’scientific truth’ has for our age almost the same ring of ultimate authority as the phrase ‘Catholic truth’ had for the past, the honest and strict scientist is the last person to claim such authority. As a human being, every scientist is a philosopher; but he is not a philosopher as a scientist. As a scientist he is vividly aware of the limitations of his branch of knowledge. He knows that science is the measurement, description and classification of natural processes; it is the study of how things behave. It cannot tell what things are, nor why they behave. It describes life in operation, but it does not presume to say what life is for.” (Watts)

To clarify from quotation and analogy: the first way in which science’s field is limited is that it explains physical causality from empirical data gathered by repeatable experiment. It does not deal with the teleological (the purpose-oriented) and has no view towards ultimate meaning – except insofar as it might aim to create a theory of everything. The question of life’s meaning is meaningless to a scientist as a scientist. A scientist may explain how humans are made up and how they operate, in vivid detail, but cannot suggest what mankind ought to do. Science has no access to the “why” of life.

Science is therefore strictly amoral, having nothing useful to say about human values or ethics, because it is not equipped to do so. The scientist as human being is obliged to look elsewhere for a sense of the good – but struggles to find it. It is not forthcoming even from philosophy, whose abstractions and liberalism have all but relegated it to the university’s cobwebbed attics, where its most unifying characteristic is a profound disunity of thought.

Consider a nonreligious morality. “If morality consists in doing good to one’s fellow man, it is clear that morality exists for man rather than man for morality, and the problem of what man himself is for is still undecided. If I live simply in order to serve my brother, what is my brother going to do with the service I give him? Serve me? Does the race exist just to serve itself, and if so to what shall it serve itself? To food and clothes for all, to information, medication and harmless amusements? Mere morality as the unifying principle brings us back dangerously close to the biological ideal of the greatest good of the greatest number. Of itself, it offers no real reason for the respect of minorities because it rests on no doctrine as to the true nature of the human person. Its motives for mutual goodwill are purely sentimental, having no deeper origin than fellow-feeling and pity on the positive side, and, on the negative side, that ingrained sense of guilt sometimes called the ‘New England’ or ‘Nonconformist’ conscience.” (Watts)

On the other hand, Christian religions “have a real doctrine of the meaning of human life, namely that man’s true end is union with God in the contemplation of the Beatific Vision. Of all ideas as to the ultimate destiny of man this alone, quite apart from any question of its truth, gives us a real end, a point beyond which the question of further purpose cannot be asked, because the enjoyment of God is an infinite good.” (Watts, extensively)

In the absence of a final or true end, morality contains only contingencies and sentiment. A purely biological understanding of man’s nature, which is the paradigm of science, results in the understanding of man as merely animal, morality as mere social contract, and leaves nothing moral to be said against contravening the contract if one can evade punishment. Apart from mere sentiment, we find no basis for the idea that man should not be treated as an animal.

In radical contrast, religion provides an ultimate end and an infinite good. The various religions naturally speak in different ways, but their answers are identical in effect. Christianity posits the contemplation of God as an infinite good and man’s ultimate end, and from the preceding discussion of the infinite and its ‘relationship to’ the finite, one may get a sense of the credibility of this valuation – what human would not enjoy the experience of union with the ultimate essence of all things? Buddhism shies away from absolutes, presenting a framework of suffering and wellbeing and working on the assumption that it is better to be well than to suffer. Nevertheless, setting (very radical) metaphysical differences aside, enlightenment and nirvana in Buddhism are analogous to the direct contemplation of God in Christianity and, if it were possible to shed the respective metaphorical skins, each would be seen to be identical with the realisation of the metaphysical infinite.

They Don’t Know What is What

There is another limitation of science: it does not explain the what.

“In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.” (Einstein and Infield, The Evolution of Physics) (emphasis mine)

Or, somewhat more succinctly, in the words of Sir Arthur Eddington describing the mystery of the electron: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” This might equally well describe the current scientist’s attitude towards the Higgs Boson, for instance, although the present case might require a greater sense of perplexity. This proper and necessary humility regarding science’s role in the world is sometimes hard to detect in contemporary scientific atheists in the God Wars. Perhaps they feel so affronted by religion’s political prevalence that they consider humility an impractical possibility, which would be entirely understandable.

To clarify this point, science explains phenomena as causes and results. It may analyse the constituents of an atom, for example, and then again the constituents of an electron, and then those of a quark, but in doing this it explains constituents of phenomena, not the essence or the nature of phenomena. Moreover, it never will.

Arguably the great hope of science is a theory of everything, an elegant theory that will completely describe every known phenomenon. This might explain the “what” and, if we are really liberal with our imagination, might go some way towards a “why” of reality. But there are important philosophical problems with the possibility of a theory of everything.

One such is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, an analogy of which (according to Stanley Jaki and Stephen Hawking) suggests very strongly that no finite number of principles can ever completely describe reality. Without getting into the complexities, which are many and much too mathematical for my limited intelligence, if Gödel’s incompleteness theorem applies to scientific theories – as it seems to – then science as we know it will never produce a consistent and complete theory of everything.

There is another problem that runs more pervasively in the domain of scientific knowledge and is also relevant to religion and metaphysic: conceptual dualism.

Over and Against

Dualism is “a state of two parts” and because it is so familiar to the Western mind it is very difficult to point it out – it is like trying to see something that is too close to one’s eye to be seen. The reason for the familiarity is that dualism arises from conceptual thought, and we have been identified with conceptual thoughts for almost our entire lives. Nevertheless, it’s worth a try.

The most fundamental dualism is a subject/object dualism. For instance, in the case “I see the cup”, “I” am the subject on this side and “the cup” is the object on its side. There are two parts. Subject/object dualism is inherent to the scientific method to date, which operates on the principle of “an experiment” on that side and “an observer” on this side. Over the last several decades, science has become familiar with the pitfalls of this idea due to discoveries in quantum mechanics, which have crystallised the ‘entangled’ nature of the observer and the observed.

Dualism is radically flawed, because, in reality, no single phenomenon is fundamentally separate, existing from its own side. There is no basic, ultimate or fundamental separation between the observer and the observed – if they were fundamentally separate, there could be no relationship or interaction between them. To think of them as separate is therefore mistaken, despite appearances of phenomenal multiplicity. That dualism is logically untenable is not a new idea to Western philosophy, although the implications of this have not permeated Western society. Although the world may appear in duality, or multiplicity, logically that can only be a false appearance.

Now, conceptual analyses are always dualistic, because every concept ‘cordons off’ its referent from the rest of reality and views it as separate. (For instance, to have a concept of a cup, you must first designate “cup” as distinct from “not-cup”.) Because conceptual analyses are always dualistic, they are always mistaken, because nothing exists in the way that it should exist in order for a conceptual analysis to be complete.

The implication for science is this: as long as inquiry remains conceptual, and therefore dualistic, it can never obtain to a true and complete knowledge or representation of reality. And it is hard to see how science can cease to operate conceptually.

However, it is false to say that because language and science cannot do it, it is impossible. Religion – or, more properly, metaphysic – is better equipped than science to answer questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Unfortunately, because the infinite is indescribable and metaphysical realisation is private, metaphysic cannot give a truly satisfactory answer to anyone ‘else’. Religion is not there to be analysed, but practised.

“No-one can tell you what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
-  Morpheus

The Faiths of Science

Among my list of ways in which scientific atheists err was the impression that they do not acknowledge the faiths inherent in a scientific worldview. It seems to me that the very idea of scientific knowledge (as opposed to scientific instrumentalism) rests on some assumptions about the world, and that if any of them are false then scientific knowledge is empty of truth. These assumptions include, but may not be limited to, beliefs that

• phenomena are real,
• that they have intrinsic properties that can be measured,
• and that science can achieve a true description of reality (as distinct from a mythological description of reality) using mathematics or language.

Even if one of these principles were to be false, it would still be the case that that X-rays reveal broken bones, that aerofoils cause lift and that nuclear explosions destroy cities. Science would still have instrumental value, which is arguably what really matters – but it would be stripped of truth value.

It is possible to delve very deeply into these philosophical questions, and (I may be wrong, but) it seems that they are by no means concluded. Until they are concluded in favour of science, the religious person defending his or her beliefs from a scientific atheist may point to the questionable truth value of science and suggest that scientific atheists overreach themselves in talking as scientists about truth or the nature of reality.

The argument from conceptual dualism, above, seems to challenge the assumption, which is necessary for science to have truth value, that language can achieve a complete description of reality. There is at least one more argument that challenges the truth-value of language, from Nietzsche in his On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense. It is difficult to decide which paragraph or series of paragraphs to quote from that astonishing essay, but this line suffice:

“It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”

Nietzsche illustrates the process of abstraction, the creation of metaphors, in a sequence: from the nerve stimulus to an image, from an image to a sound (a word) and from a word to a concept, which, he says “simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.”

This is a massive and fundamental critique of the truth value of language and is by no means aimed at science in particular, but its relevance for the truth value of science, since science is based on language, is obvious.

Enough is Enough

Now my fingers are tired. I hope that I’ve illustrated the ways in which both parties to the God Wars make some unfortunate mistakes, and that the realisation of these might lead to an overall decline in hostilities. I hope that the body of this essay has provided its readers with some useful food for thought, and that perhaps the taste is richer and subtler than might at first have been suspected.

My tone may have resembled that of a religious apologist. I do perceive a value in religion that seems to be missed by scientific atheists as well as by some religious people. These latter I would, if pushed, call politically or dogmatically religious rather than integrally religious – they emphasise dogma and faith to the exclusion or ignorance of the realisation or experience to which the dogma points and faith leads. By the same token, were it not such an undesirable label for them, I would call some scientific atheists religious in an integral sense notwithstanding their refusal to admit any articles of faith. I would mean it as a compliment.

In brief conclusion, I have tried to show that religious people and scientific atheists do not need to fight – unless it is over a matter of genuine practical import, like the coalescence of church and state. Where they fight over other matters, it is usually because they misunderstand each other’s position or have only a coarse understanding of their own. Each school can learn a great deal from the other, and many followers of both actually do.

A brief summary of the values universal to all religions would include compassion, humility, wisdom, patience and love. The view remains widespread that religions are hateful and dangerous; that the harm religion has wrought through ‘religious’ wars and superstition exceeds the good brought about by people who have dedicated their lives to the selfless service of others in the name of their religion; and that humankind would be better off if religion was eradicated. The latter view is especially naïve, but any of these views are understandable only from a perspective that conflates the religious with the political (as many religious people continue to do). The motivations for war are greed and fear; ‘religious’ wars are given a specious cloak of religiosity by the rulers who instigate them, so that they appear righteous to the people who actually do the fighting. In this way religion, like any other doctrine, may be used for evil – but that is not a fault inherent to religion. Fundamentalism of any kind will always be dangerous, and dogma will never be a valid substitute for reason.

That patience is among the virtues of all religions makes religious people’s inflamed participation in the God Wars all the more frustrating. The response of a truly religious person would be patient, humble, compassionate and loving, or at least written with the effort or aspiration to be so.

My personal and tentative working thesis at present is that religions (and, in fact, words in general) are like fingers pointing at the moon. There are many fingers, but only one moon. It is important for religious people to notice that other fingers also point in the same direction. And it is crucial, for anyone, not to be so attached to the finger that one never looks at the moon.