Bad news, friends. You have no soul, according to a few professors at Fuller Theological Seminary. I say this after happening upon a copy of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited by Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, all full-fledged Fullerian professors. They say the soul is now scientifically, and hence theologically passé.

What happened to the poor soul, that it should suddenly be shuffled away? According to Murphy, the theologian-philosopher of the group, it's been downsized by science, for "nearly all of the human capacities or faculties once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain" (p.1). Therefore, we are invited to embrace what Murphy, Brown, and Malony have dubbed "non-reductive physicalism," a form of materialism that includes all the benefits of having a soul—"rationality, emotion, morality, free will, and, most importantly, the capacity to be in relationship with God" (p.2)—but just without the soul.

This, however, is an impossibly contradictory position. You cannot deny the existence of the soul, and then appropriate all of its capacities, as if nothing happened. All physicalism is reductive. "Non-reductive physicalism" will show itself to be an impossible compromise.

What accounts for their attempt to offer such a compromise? That will take some explaining, and hence some patience on the part of the reader.

I would like by proposing that human beings are rational animals, a fundamental unity of an immaterial, rational soul and material body. This is a view as old as Aristotle and as common as common sense.

It sits in the seat of sanity between two extreme views of human nature. One extreme holds that we are essentially spirit-rational but not animal. This extreme may be called "Gnosticism," and its devotees claim that human beings are purely intellectual creatures sitting incongruously in their bodies like ghostly drivers in alien machines.

The other extreme believes human beings are merely animals, and that the rational soul is a fiction. This extreme, commonly known as "materialism," insists that humans are purely material beings. Murphy, Brown, and Maloney are in the grip of this latter view, and it has caused them to heave the soul overboard. Yet, as we have seen, they are trying to avoid the inevitable reductionism.

"No, no! You misunderstand!" I can hear them shout. "We were forced to jettison the soul by science."

In my book, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, I show how despite many of its founders' intentions, modern science came to be defined by materialism. According to this extreme, the belief in immateriality, especially the immateriality of the soul, was illusory. The goal of science, as defined by materialism, was to strip away such illusions by reducing everything to purely material causes. In regard to the soul, then, the entire research program was aimed at showing that all thinking, willing, and acting could be reduced to bodily causes. It aimed, in sum, to replace the soul with the brain or some other material thing.

"Why then," you might ask, "has modern science found so much evidence of the material nature of our thinking, and no evidence, so it seems, of our having a rational, immaterial soul?"

That is quite simple. It is difficult to find what you are not looking for. Modern science, defined materialistically, has made grand progress in examining the intricacy of our animal nature precisely because its goal was to reduce us to mere animality.

If, however, scientists suddenly decided to examine the ways in which our rationality cannot be reduced to our animality, they would also discover the forgotten half of our nature. If scientists began to search for proof that our reasoning capacities extend beyond the material instrument of the brain, and indeed control the brain's activities even while relying on them, then they would discover the immaterial soul. But insofar as they continue to hold to the materialist belief that only material things exist, they will only find what they are looking for.

Further, if we realize that we are rational animals, then the latest brain research poses no real problem. It is simply a half-truth distended illicitly into a whole truth. If we are indeed rational animals, we should expect to find that thinking depends on our animal nature, including our brain, in the same way that our rational volition, for its execution, depends on the use of our hands, legs, eyes, or ears. If our thinking didn't depend on the brain, then we truly would be angels trapped in animal suits.

So, I don't need to poke about in the brain to realize that a good cup of coffee makes thinking a whole lot easier after a bad night's sleep. Of that a good jolt of java helps me approach near angelic intellectual clarity (for a couple of hours, anyway). Then again, I also experience my control over my entire being. My acts of volition are real, and I use my body, not like an alien machine, but as part of my unified being. I am able to think new thoughts, muddling and musing my way to discovery and new insights, and I use my brain to do it. I am often lost in thought, and forget to eat on time, utterly abstracted from my body, but after a while, I find I am so hungry that I have become weak and I can't think until I eat.

In short, my everyday experience undermines both extremes, and sets me firmly back in the seat of sanity. I am neither a Gnostic angel with no need of a brain or body to think, nor am I a slightly elevated ape for whom thinking is merely an elaborate form of sensation. I am, to repeat, a rational animal, an essential unity of immaterial soul and material body. If we try to cling to either extreme, and neglect this golden mean, then we are forced into denying what we actually know and experience.

And so, speaking to Nancey Murphy in particular (since she is the lone philosopher-theologian of the three), I offer the following. Again, the position of non-reductive physicalism is contradictory. To begin with, as you yourself rather curiously assert, "no amount of evidence from the neurosciences can ever prove dualism of soul and body to be false, or physicalism true" (p. 127). This amounts to saying, it seems, that materialist science cannot prove either that the immaterial soul does not exist or that materialism is itself true. Given this strange assertion, it would seem less than reasonable to offer a new and improved soulless theology.

Finally, as Murphy admits, "The concept of the soul has played a major role in the history of Christian ethics for centuries, for example, as justification for prohibition of abortion and euthanasia, and for differential treatment of animals and humans" (p. 24). So true, so true, and it has become increasingly clear, as the exclusively materialist account of human beings has taken hold of society, that abortion has become commonplace, euthanasia will soon follow suit (along with infanticide), and any distinction between human beings and other animals is fast fading away. Knowing this danger, it causes me to wonder if there is some other reason Murphy is bending her theology to a particular view of science.

In summary, the latest scientific findings concerning the brain should not be startling. We are indeed animals and our thinking depends on our brain even while it transcends it. Such a "discovery" is parallel to the ancient argument that all human knowledge begins with sensation. But, in the same way that you destroy knowledge itself if you reduce knowledge to sensation, you will destroy the soul and all its capacities, if you simply replace "soul" with "brain."

And so, I am happy to report, the death of the soul has been greatly exaggerated.

According to scientific orthodoxy, all living things were entirely determined by their genetic code. Hence the neo-Darwinian motto: DNA is destiny. But the latest news from researchers is that DNA is not destiny. As an article in Discover Magazine makes clear, the science of epigenetics has some humbling news for predestination scientists of genetics. Neither human beings nor any other animal is reducible to the nucleotide sequence in DNA. Instead, who we are is also determined by how we are.

The name of the science, epigenetics, puts genetics in its place. Genetics is the study of genes, the so-called basic units of heredity encoded in specific sequences of DNA nucleotides. Epigenetics means the study of those things over and above the gene (“epi” is a Greek prefix that means “above” or “over”).

For too long, scientists have assumed that there isn’t anything “above” the gene. That is, anything that appeared to be above the gene—the cell, and more importantly, the larger multi-celled organism and everything it is, does, and ever will do—they declared to be reducible to the gene.

Hence, the wild fervor in, and jubilation about, the Human Genome Project. If we map the entire genome—the entire genetic sequence—then human nature will be an open book. Having cracked the code, we’ll be able to read our form and fate.

Such was the doctrine of necessity, but “it ain’t necessarily so.” According to science writer Ethan Watters, the recent work of epigeneticists “has made it increasingly clear that for all the popular attention devoted to genome-sequencing projects, the epigenome is just as critical as DNA to the healthy development of organisms.”

Proof? Here’s an interesting example. We’ve been led to think that every malady we suffer—say, obesity, or proneness to diabetes or cancer—is caused by our having an unlucky gene. And even worse, we’ll pass this unlucky gene to our offspring, and they will do the same in turn.

Enter a neat little experiment with Agouti Mice, so named because they carry a particular gene, mellifluously called the agouti gene, that not only disposes them to being overweight but also to contract diabetes and cancer. A sure case of DNA is destiny.

Not so. Instead of trying to micromanage the genome, researchers did the motherly thing, and changed the mouse’s diet. Whereas before, most of the offspring of such mice were doomed to display the same traits, now, after a diet change, the majority of the offspring produced were perfectly healthy mice.

DNA is not destiny. The “diet rich in methyl donors,” a type of molecule found in many ordinary foods, such as onions, garlic, and beets, turned off the agouti gene in the offspring. The lesson: there is a big difference between having a gene, and having that gene expressed.

But things are stranger still. Let’s turn from mice to rats. As with human mothers, so also with mother rats: some are very motherly, others are cold and distant. Researchers found that affectionate mother rats actually had a positive effect on their offspring after they were born.

The nurturing activity (licking their young) actually caused the hippocampus in the brain of offspring to develop more fully and to release less of a particular stress hormone, cortisol. The result: calmer, less skittish rats. The rats with cold and distant mothers, by contrast, were nervous and timid, and developed smaller hippocampi.

Why? The mother’s motherly licking released serotonin in her little pups’ brains, which nudges the hippocampus to send a protein message to turn on genes that inhibit stress. A little motherly love, and DNA is no longer destiny.

From mice (and rats) to men? What does it mean?

To begin with, this crack in reductionism cannot help but become bigger and bigger. If mere diet changes and a little motherly love can have such dramatic effects, what else might change our DNA expression from a pre-written script, to a story we help write, both for ourselves and our offspring?

Epigenetics therefore represents a major shift back to common sense. Predestinarian DNA-ism denies the common sense notion that what we choose to do and not to do has a real effect on our lives and the lives of others. But if such small changes makes such large differences in mice and rats, what we human beings choose to do and not to do could make a world of difference. Free will is not only real; to a yet undetermined extent, it can override DNA.

But these latest scientific discoveries also spell the end of the reductionist paradigm of neo-Darwinism. As with Darwinism, neo-Darwinism wanted to keep everything simple. The chant that DNA is destiny was a way to make life, including human life, so simple that it needed no other explanation than that provided by brute materialism.

Neo-Darwinians therefore claimed that they could explain all of human life in all its complexity in terms of genes—bodies, minds, romance, art, literature, passions, pursuits, politics, religion, music. All could be put down to which genes won out in the struggle for survival, and some occasional happy mutations.

Now it seems like the reverse. The greatest effect on our genes might be epigenetic. Beautiful music, deep romance, and great art could yield just as significantly beneficial results as motherly and fatherly affection. Suddenly, epigenetically caused gene expression is as much if not more important than the genes themselves.

This presents a serious difficulty to neo-Darwinism. The charm of neo-Darwinism was that it was simplicity itself. All complexity could be explained by a simple, one-way mechanism. Beneficial genes caused beneficial traits; natural selection picked off the less fit; those with more beneficial traits survived to hand on their genes.

But epigenetics opens up the possibility that there are literally countless things above the level of the gene that could contribute to something’s ability to survive, be it mouse or man. That is not simplicity itself, for the genes only tell half the story. The other half is epigenetic.
 
 
Originally published in To the Source. Used with permission.
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"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

So says Richard Dawkins. Obviously, he doesn't want readers to think he's on the fence about God as presented in the Old Testament—or at least, how God seems to Dawkins. But if we clean ourselves up after this blast of rhetorical wind, how strong is Dawkins' case against God?

Dawkins lists a number of objectionable Old Testament scenes, ending with God's command to massacre the Midianites (Num 31:17-18), Joshua's putting all of the inhabitants of Jericho to the sword (Josh 6:21), and God's "rules" for waging holy war in Canaan (Dt 20:10-18). In regard to the last two, he remarks, "the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of Kurds and the Marsh Arabs," and "Do not think, by the way, that the God character in the story nursed any doubts or scruples about the massacres and genocides that accompanied the seizing of the Promised Land…. [T]he people who lived in the land…should be invited to surrender peacefully. If they refused, all the men were to be killed and the women carried off for breeding."

Let's try a little experiment, and assume Dawkins' skewed and unfair reading of the Bible. Suppose upon reading his devastating attack on the God of the Old Testament, we would reject the Bible and embrace Dawkins' atheism—exactly what Dawkins wishes to be the effect on readers. What then? Would we be any better off?

First of all, as he himself admits in his book River out of Eden, in coming over to Dawkins' side, we have thereby embraced a cosmos indifferent to good or evil. As a consequence, we immediately face a dilemma: we have no moral grounds for condemning the actions of God (He doesn't exist) or the characters in the Bible (good and evil don't exist). Since God doesn't exist, there is no reason to work up a froth of indignation against Him, anymore than against the lunkheaded Zeus in Homer's Iliad.

Yet now another, more amusing problem arises for Dawkins as the champion of Darwinism today. It would seem that a good many of the complaints made by Dawkins against the God of the Old Testament could with equal justice be made against natural selection itself. To say the least, that puts himself in a paradoxical position.

If we might put it in an arresting way, many sociologists of religion argue that primitive people tend to fashion their notions of the gods according to the way they experience nature, as nature deified (whether this is true or not, we won't decide here, but will take it on trust for the purposes of illustration). What would evolution look like if we tried to deify evolution's principles? Would the Evolution God (EG) be "unjust" in its callous indifference "to all suffering," and supremely so, for continually picking off the weak and sickly? Would EG be an "unforgiving control-freak," "megalomaniacal," and "petty" since (as Darwin stated), "It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relations to its organic and inorganic conditions of life"? Would EG be "sadomasochistic" in his use of suffering, destruction, and death as the means to create new forms of life? A "capriciously malevolent bully" in his "lacking all purpose" and being "callous"? A "bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser," "genocidal," and "racist" in his continually pitting one species population against another in severe struggle, the struggles among humans taking place between tribe and tribe, race and race? And what adjective would describe EG, who uses these deadly struggles as the very vehicle responsible for the upward climb of human evolution?

So we've rejected the God of the Old Testament for Dawkins' atheistic account of evolution, only to find out that many of the traits Dawkins marked as repugnant are ensconced in natural selection (except that now, as a new and even more unfortunate kind of Job, we have no one against whom to complain).

Perhaps Dawkins will fare better in his case against the people of the Old Testament? But now another paradox comes to the fore. On Dawkins' own grounds, it would be hard to imagine a people who more assiduously pursued a better set of evolutionary strategies for ensuring that its gene pool was carried forward, undiluted by rival tribes and races, than the ancient Jews. They were genetic geniuses!

Think over the above "reprehensible" examples Dawkins provided from the Bible, and then ruminate upon his account of how evolution, including human evolution, works. Dawkins maintains in his classic book The Selfish Gene that we may "treat the individual as a selfish machine, programmed to do whatever is best for its genes as a whole" (although, as he makes clear, the invisible level of the struggle between genes in a single individual is, for him, the real level of natural selection and the struggle to survive). The selfish machine works, literally, by gene-o-cide, the destruction and use of other selfish machines, treating them as fodder for its own survival.

What, then, is left of Dawkins' case against the God of the Old Testament? Nothing at all.
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with permission.
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One of the enduring myths of the secular state is that religion is so dangerous, so volatile, so likely to burst into conflagrations of violence, that the only protection we have from societal destruction is the erection of a wall that separates religion from the state.

We've all heard the story, and in fact, having also heard endless tales of horror about the great religious wars—especially the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War—we might be strongly inclined to believe the myth.

Even my calling it a myth seems out of place. Isn't it true—in fact, a truism—that wherever religion and politics mix, it is like gasoline and a match? Isn't that what history teaches us?

No. History actually teaches us two things.

First, as William Cavanaugh so powerfully argues in his Myth of Religious Violence, when we take a closer look at the 16th and 17th century wars of religion we find that differences between Catholics and Protestants, and Protestants and other Protestants, were secondary to the aims of the emerging nation-states and various political and dynastic intrigues. Simply put, the main cause of these wars was political, not religious.

How can that be? If religious differences were the main cause of these bloody conflicts, Cavanaugh maintains, then we would expect to find that they were invariably fought along neat denominational lines. What we actually find is Catholic emperors attacking popes, Catholic French kings attacking Catholic emperors, Protestant kings and princes siding with Catholic kings against other Protestants, Lutheran and Catholic kings uniting against Catholic emperors, Protestant Huguenot nobles and Catholic nobles in France uniting against both Catholic and Protestant Huguenot commoners who likewise united against the nobles, Protestant and Catholic nobles in France uniting against their Catholic king, Protestants rejecting the Protestant Union (the coalition of German Protestant states) even while some Catholics were siding with it, Lutheran princes adamantly supporting the rights of a Catholic emperor, Catholic France supporting Protestant princes in Germany, the Dutch Calvinists helping the Catholic king to repress uprisings of French Calvinists, a Lutheran leading the Catholic imperial army, and mercenaries of every religious stripe selling themselves to the highest Catholic or Protestant bidder.

And that is only a very quick overview of the examples provided, at great length, by Cavanaugh. A careful, unbiased study of the so-called religious wars yields the rather surprising result that they were not religious wars. They were political wars that both ignored religious differences when the more important political aims demanded either cooperation with religious opponents or antagonism to those sharing the same religious beliefs, and used religious differences when they would serve political purposes.

That's the first history lesson. The second is equally important, and related to the first. As Cavanaugh makes equally clear, the secular state needed (and still needs) people to believe the story that religion is the cause of violence because this belief allows for the actual creation of the secular state. The secular state is what emerges when religion is forcibly removed from the public square through the powers of the state. The myth of religious violence justifies the removal of religion, and it is through that very removal that the state achieves secularization.

This can be seen, argues Cavanaugh, in the landmark Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education (1947) that interpreted the Establishment Clause as demanding (in Justice Hugo Black's words, borrowed in turn from Thomas Jefferson) the erection of "a wall of separation between church and State."

As other legal historians have shown, Jefferson's words had little or no legal effect prior to Everson. American jurisprudence was defined by the notion of cooperation between the church and state because there was general agreement that the state needed the moral and religious support provided by the church.

But by the mid-twentieth century, secularism had taken hold of the intelligentsia and, through university education, had formed the mindset of legal scholars and jurists. They were formed by the Enlightenment myth that religion was a negative presence that, for the sake of human progress, needed to be eliminated for the sake of peace. A sign of this (as everyone believed) was the horrible atrocities of the religious wars.

So it was that Justice Hugo Black, in his majority opinion, used that notion that religious violence in Europe was the defining reason why the American founders had written the First Amendment's Establishment Clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."

As proof, Black invoked Jefferson's famous words from a letter of 1802 written to the Danbury Baptists, wherein Jefferson remarks, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." So, Black ended his opinion with the flourish: "The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable."

For Black, and especially for those secular-minded justices using the reasoning of Everson thereafter, the specter of religious violence demanded the secularization of politics. So it was that, since 1947, Everson has been used to stop Bible reading and prayer in public schools, deny Christian groups access to public school and public university buildings, justify the removal of nativity scenes from public squares and Ten Commandment plaques from judicial buildings, and (unsuccessfully) to remove "In God We Trust" from coins.

In short, Everson has become an instrument for state-sanctioned secularization. It has effected the emergence of a truly secular state precisely through the active separation of the church from the state and the erection of a wall of separation. Historically, this active separation, and wall, created the secular state where one did not exist before. And I think I need to add (to capture the full irony of its use of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause), this active separation establishes a secular state, using federal power to transform America from a Judeo-Christian culture to a secular culture.

Now you see the connection between the first history lesson and the second. If the notion that religion is the main cause of bloody conflict is a myth, and the so-called religious wars were actually fueled by political ambition, then the alleged pressing need to erect an impregnable wall of separation between church and state, collapses as well. What, then, is the justification for the secularized state?
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with permission.
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The human mind, by its nature, strives to know everything. But just because we have the desire to know everything, our reach often exceeds a sure grasp of reality, and we fall into fantasy. So it is with Robert Lanza's Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe which offers a new and elaborate form of solipsism. The universe and everything in it, Lanza asserts confidently, exists because we perceive it. In his words, "the observer creates reality, and not the other way around." The moon exists only when we are looking at it. When we walk out of the kitchen, and turn our mind elsewhere, the kitchen is no longer there.

Here is Lanza's argument in a kind of syllogistic nutshell. On the smallest level, the submicroscopic level of quantum mechanics, our attempts to measure the location or momentum of subatomic particles results in a strange paradox. Particles exhibit both the qualities of particles and waves, although not both at once. They seem to be potentially both, but become actually one or the other only when we attempt to measure them. But we can only measure them either as waves or particles, but not both at once. The way we measure them determines the way they act.

Imagine it this way. You are on one side of a wall and a bit of light exists on the other. The wall has two doors, three feet apart, so you can't look through both at once. One door is marked "particle" and the other is marked "wave." You open the "particle" door, and the light acts like a particle. You slam the door shut, and run quickly to open the other door, and lo and behold, it now acts like a wave.

Therefore, concludes Lanza, the act of observing, of attempting to measure the light, actually causes it to move from a fuzzy state of probability (potentially either a particle or wave), to a crisp state of reality (actually either a particle or wave). In more technical, mathematical terms, observation causes the light to move from a wave function probability, to a wave function collapse. And so (brace yourself for a syllogistic leap), since everything is made of particles, then everything no matter how large—the moon, your kitchen, the universe—exists in a state of fuzzy probability until someone observes it.

Lanza buttresses his argument that our perception causes reality by several, more familiar arguments from ancient and modern skeptics that purport to show that "reality" should be kept in quotes. Things aren't really colored; color is merely the way our visual system paints things. There is no sound; what we call sound is only the effect that vibrations have on our ear. Given the vast empty spaces inside atoms, things made of atoms are not solid, but mostly space; we perceive things as solid only because we are too large to see the vast empty subatomic spaces. Furthermore, space and time aren't real entities outside us, but constructions from within us, helping us to divide up and order our experiences.

And so we come to the title of Lanza's book. Since we are biological beings, and our observation causes reality to appear (or at least to crystallize), the universe is therefore biocentric. In fact, Lanza proclaims, the universe appears to be so finely-tuned for life, especially for intelligent life, precisely because we are the ones that order it by our perception. Of course it seems to be made for intelligent perceivers. We are the ones creating it by our perception!

What to make of such an argument? Lanza is fantastically intelligent, but as with so many others similarly blessed, it leads him into fantasy. On the most practical level, Lanza's argument fails the bullet test. If Lanza's argument were true, then a bullet fired at someone would only kill him if he perceived it, and thereby brought the bullet from a fuzzy state of potentiality, to an actual state of penetrating his skull.

On a more theoretical level, Lanza suffers from a confusion of levels of reality. What is true on one level of reality does not necessarily pertain to another. The strangle paradoxes of quantum mechanics do not appear on the macroscopic level. We don't have a problem with measuring both the position and momentum of a bullet, in the same way that we have a problem measuring both the position and momentum of a subatomic particle.

The philosophical error at the bottom of Lanza's confusion of levels of reality is reductionist materialism. According to such reductionism, only atoms are real (or, peeling down further, only subatomic particles). If atoms aren't colored, then nothing has color. If atoms don't smell, odor isn't real. If atoms aren't solid, then all solidity vanishes. If subatomic particles behave in strange ways, then all appearances to the contrary, everything else really acts like subatomic particles.

But it ain't so. The truth is that each layer of reality, from the microscopic to the macroscopic, has its own integrity, building upon the layers below it even while it reveals its own amazing and real properties. Atoms are smaller than a wavelength of light, therefore they can't have color, but atoms in large, ordered aggregations are big enough to reflect light, and so make possible the reality of being colored. Solidity is not found on an atomic level, but the atomic level makes real solidity possible on the macroscopic realm. We calculate the position and momentum of ordinary objects all the time, from a baseball thrown by a pitcher or a missile shot from the deck of a warship, to the orbit of the moon or the schedule of a train. In fact, it is precisely the stability, solidity, and predictability of the macroscopic world that allows us to set up experimental equipment to measure the strange paradoxes of the submicroscopic world. The paradoxes are real, but then again, so are we, the equipment, the moon, the kitchen, and the universe.
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with author's permission.

If you study the history of science long enough, you realize that you've got to ask two questions about any scientific theory, especially the biggest and most grand of them. What is it? Why was it put forth? The two almost invariably go together. We cannot truly grasp what the theory is, until we understand the motives of those who developed it.

Now here the obvious objection would be this. The what of a theory is really the only question, because the why is so obvious as not to need asking. The motive of every scientist is to discover the truth about reality. He puts forth his theory because he wants to get at what things really are, and he believes that his theory helps to explain current perplexities, unify disparate data, and provide a theoretical framework for future fruitful research and discovery.

Certainly the what is sufficient in many cases, but not all. Consider the current rage for Multiverse Theory. In this case, they why almost entirely explains the what. Before the Big Bang, almost all scientists believed that the universe was eternal. Eternal universes don't need a God to create them. It looked like science supported atheism. So when scientists discovered the Big Bang—that the universe had a definite beginning, and quite literally came into being out of nothing—they recoiled and rebelled. Suddenly, it looked as if the theistic account had trumped the scientists' efforts to explain the universe without God.

Even worse, from the secular perspective, was that the more scientists dug into the beginning of things, the more they discovered that the universe from its birth to its present state is astoundingly fine-tuned, so finely-tuned, so delicately balanced, so excruciatingly calibrated in every aspect that one could only reasonably conclude (to quote physicist Fred Hoyle's famous words) that "a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."

Multiverse Theory appears to be a desperate response to this situation. Exquisite fine-tuning is a scientific fact. The only way around it for the secular-minded was to suggest that there are actually an infinite number of other universes, and that we just happened to be one of the lucky few that by mere chance turned out so nicely. The cosmic lottery approach has, however, a few serious drawbacks:

1. There is no evidence for it.
2. There is no way to get evidence for it.
3. The only reason that it exists as a theory is that certain scientists do not like the theistic implications of the Big Bang and fine-tuning.

So here, the what is entirely explained in terms of the why, or the motives of those that put forth Multiverse Theory.

Now what about Inflationary Theory? First of all, unlike Multiverse Theory, Inflationary Theory is actually in textbooks as if it were a fact, an elegant implication of Big Bang cosmology that all reasonable scientists accept. And second, unlike Multiverse Theory, which doesn't explain anything, Inflationary Theory has at least born some fruit. It does seem to explain some things, and appears to have helped scientists to make theoretical headway in sorting out the complexities of our cosmos. That's why it got into textbooks as a theory that's all but a fact. Or so it seems.

But things aren't always what they seem. In a recent Scientific American (April 2011), one of the architects of Inflationary Theory, Paul Steinhardt, makes some startling admissions both about the caliber of the theory itself, and even more, about the motives in putting it forth.

As it turns out, Inflationary Theory shares this, at least, with Multiverse Theory: it was put forth to avoid a fine-tuning "problem," the so-called "flatness problem." Space isn't a big, pre-existing blackboard into which the Big Bang pops into existence; space itself came into being with the Big Bang, and its "shape" or curvature is directly affected by the density of matter and energy in it. Too much, and you get what's called a "closed" universe, which instead of expanding in a nicely uniform way, collapses back in upon itself. Too little, and you've got an "open" universe, and expansion yields cosmic smithereens. But with just the right density, the exact, very precise amount teetering on a razor's edge between too much and too little, you get, well, our universe, a "flat" universe.

Inflationary Theory was put forth, in great part, to solve that "problem," a problem that is only a problem if you refuse to infer the reasonable conclusion that the creation of our universe was too profoundly well-orchestrated for it to be put down to a cosmic accident. Inflationary theorists tried to get around the God problem by assuming that all that was needed was a fantastic growth spurt right at the very beginning of the Big Bang that ironed out all the wrinkles so to speak, and ensured that the universe would be, as it is, remarkably uniform, with only a very, very few tiny variations in the distribution of matter and energy. If inflation could be assumed, then unseemly "globs" of energy that would unbalance and warp expansion could be, as it were, mixed thoroughly into the batter through an initial burst of rapid expansion. (Inflation also helps to explain the "horizon problem," the fact that parts of the universe that could not possibly be connected causally, have a uniform temperature—but again, that's a problem only if you want the Big Bang to be a cosmic accident.)

Now comes a confession by Paul Steinhardt, who helped put the whole Inflationary model together. "Something peculiar has happened to inflationary theory" since its inception about three decades ago. "As the case for inflation has grown stronger, so has the case against [it]. The two cases are not equally well known: the evidence favoring inflation is familiar to a broad range of physicists, astrophysicists and science aficionados. Surprisingly few seem to follow the case against inflation….Most astrophysicists have gone about their business testing the predictions of textbook inflationary theory without worrying about these deeper issues, hoping they would eventually be resolved. Unfortunately, the problems have resisted our best efforts to date."

What are the problems? First, in order for inflation to produce the universe we actually live in, the inflation energy itself would have to have been very precisely tuned. Second, the initial conditions had to be exactly right as well: "Of all the ways the universe could have begun, only a tiny fraction would lead to the uniform, flat state observed today." Third, there is nothing about inflation that stops it. Inflation is eternal, and therefore ends up creating an infinity of universes of every variety, not just our just-so universe. The upshot: the theory can make no exact predictions that would explain our universe. "What does it mean to say that inflation makes certain predictions," laments Steinhardt, "if anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times. And if the theory does not make testable predictions, how can cosmologists claim that the theory agrees with observations, as they routinely do?" The only way around this last problem is to have the inflation energy and initial conditions finely-tuned so as to achieve the actual outcome: our delicately balanced, wonderfully wrought universe.

Does that spell the end of Inflation as a theory? No, because a majority of scientists continue to give it their support, they will undoubtedly continue to chip away at the "problem" of fine-tuning. It is, for the secular-minded scientist, very difficult to admit that they are still bewildered with fine-tuning after thinking they had a way around at least some of it with Inflation.

Does that bring Steinhardt back to accepting the fact that the universe is finely-tuned? No, he's since come up with a rival theory to Inflation, "Cyclic Theory." The problem with cyclic theory—which isn't really new—is that it pushes back the same questions about fine-tuning to a "previous" universe that expanded and contracted and produced this one.

As critics have noted, Cyclic Theory creates more problems than it solves. It may soon follow the fate of Inflationary Theory. But because it doesn't involve God, it still has traction today among scientists who will take seriously any explanation of the universe, so long as it doesn't involve God.
 
 
Originally posted at To the Source. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Astronomy Notes)

EDITOR'S NOTE: For the last half of the twentieth century, Antony Flew (1923-2010) was the world's most famous atheist. Long before Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris began taking swipes at religion, Flew was the preeminent spokesman for unbelief.

However in 2004, he shocked the world by announcing he had come to believe in God. While never embracing Christianity—Flew only believed in the deistic, Aristotelian conception of God—he became one of the most high-profile and surprising atheist converts. In 2007, he recounted his conversion in a book titled There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Some critics suggested Flew's mental capacity had declined and therefore we should question the credibility of his conversion. Others hailed Flew's book as a legitimate and landmark publication.

A couple months before the book's release, Flew sat down with Strange Notions contributor Dr. Benjamin Wiker for an interview about his book, his conversion, and the reasons that led him to God. Read below and enjoy!
 

 
Dr. Benjamin Wiker: You say in There is a God, that "it may well be that no one is as surprised as I am that my exploration of the Divine has after all these years turned from denial...to discovery." Everyone else was certainly very surprised as well, perhaps all the more so since on our end, it seemed so sudden. But in There is a God, we find that it was actually a very gradual process—a "two decade migration," as you call it. God was the conclusion of a rather long argument, then. But wasn't there a point in the "argument" where you found yourself suddenly surprised by the realization that "There is a God" after all? So that, in some sense, you really did "hear a Voice that says" in the evidence itself "'Can you hear me now?'"

Antony Flew: There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself—which is far more complex than the physical Universe—can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.

Wiker: You are famous for arguing for a presumption of atheism, i.e., as far as arguments for and against the existence of God, the burden of proof lies with the theist. Given that you believe that you only followed the evidence where it led, and it led to theism, it would seem that things have now gone the other way, so that the burden of proof lies with the atheist. He must prove that God doesn't exist. What are your thoughts on that?

Flew: I note in my book that some philosophers indeed have argued in the past that the burden of proof is on the atheist. I think the origins of the laws of nature and of life and the Universe point clearly to an intelligent Source. The burden of proof is on those who argue to the contrary.

Wiker: As for evidence, you cite a lot of the most recent science, yet you remark that your discovery of the Divine did not come through "experiments and equations," but rather, "through an understanding of the structures they unveil and map." Could you explain? Does that mean that the evidence that led you to God is not really, at heart, scientific?

Flew: It was empirical evidence, the evidence uncovered by the sciences. But it was a philosophical inference drawn from the evidence. Scientists as scientists cannot make these kinds of philosophical inferences. They have to speak as philosophers when they study the philosophical implications of empirical evidence.

Wiker: You are obviously aware of the spate of recent books by such atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. They think that those who believe in God are behind the times. But you seem to be politely asserting that they are ones who are behind the times, insofar as the latest scientific evidence tends strongly toward—or perhaps even demonstrates—a theistic conclusion. Is that a fair assessment of your position?

Flew: Yes, indeed. I would add that Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists on the philosophical implications of the scientific data.

Two noted philosophers, one an agnostic (Anthony Kenny) and the other an atheist (Thomas Nagel), recently pointed out that Dawkins has failed to address three major issues that ground the rational case for God. As it happens, these are the very same issues that had driven me to accept the existence of a God: the laws of nature, life with its teleological organization, and the existence of the Universe.

Wiker: You point out that the existence of God and the existence of evil are actually two different issues, which would therefore require two distinct investigations. But in the popular literature—even in much of the philosophical literature—the two issues are regularly conflated. Especially among atheists, the presumption is that the non-existence of God simply follows upon the existence of evil. What is the danger of such conflation? How as a theist do you now respond?

Flew: I should clarify that I am a deist. I do not accept any claim of divine revelation though I would be happy to study any such claim (and continue to do so in the case of Christianity). For the deist, the existence of evil does not pose a problem because the deist God does not intervene in the affairs of the world. The religious theist, of course, can turn to the free-will defense (in fact I am the one who first coined the phrase free-will defense). Another relatively recent change in my philosophical views is my affirmation of the freedom of the will.

Wiker: According to There is a God, you are not what might be called a "thin theist," that is, the evidence led you not merely to accept that there is a "cause" of nature, but "to accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being." How far away are you, then, from accepting this Being as a person rather than a set of characteristics, however accurate they may be? (I'm thinking of C. S. Lewis' remark that a big turning point for him, in accepting Christianity, was in realizing that God was not a "place"—a set of characteristics, like a landscape—but a person.)

Flew: I accept the God of Aristotle who shares all the attributes you cite. Like Lewis I believe that God is a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.

Wiker: Do you plan to write a follow-up book to There is a God?

Flew: As I said in opening the book, this is my last will and testament.
 
 
Originally published at To the Source. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Skeptic.com)

In science today, we are under the tyranny of an image, the image of an explosion—the Big Bang. Ironically, this term was not derived from evidence but from contempt. Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), the celebrated astronomer, was so incensed at the notion that the universe might have a beginning that he began to refer to proponents of this view as believing that the universe started in some kind of a “big bang.”

He was quite surprised when the fires of his sarcasm, rather than withering his opponents, inadvertently coined the now commonly accepted term.

Interestingly enough, the astronomy magazine Sky and Telescope had a contest in 1994 to rename the Big Bang. There were over 10,000 entries, but the judges were unable to find a more golden term to coin. Thus, they declared the “Big Bang” it shall remain.

But what if the Big Bang was really a Big Bloom—not an enormous explosion, but a rapid and wondrous unfolding like a flower emerging from a densely-packed bud? Then the term “Big Bang” would be disastrously inaccurate. Happily, scientists are gathering more and more evidence that Bloom should replace Bang as the most accurate image of our cosmic origin.

To give ourselves a metaphor, imagine being invited to two events. The first is called “The Big Bang: See a House Blown Up!” You arrive at the address, a house sitting in a field, and settle into a lawn chair a comfortable distance away. The host announces: “Behold! The Big Bang!” and immediately the 3-bedroom brick farmhouse explodes into a cloud of smoke. As the wind slowly dissipates the smoke, you see a large pile of debris—glass shards, jagged pieces of wood, broken bricks, and dust.

The second event is called “The Big Bang: See a House Blown Up!” You arrive at the address, fully expecting a repeat, but in the field, instead of a house, you find a large pile of debris—glass shards, jagged pieces of wood, broken bricks, and dust. You settle into your lawn chair a little bemused. Just then, the host announces: “Behold! The Big Bang!” and immediately the pile of debris explodes into a cloud of smoke. As the wind clears away the smoke, you see a 3-bedroom brick farmhouse.

Obviously the first event conforms to what we mean by “bang,” because an explosion increases disorder (what scientists call “entropy”). But what of the second event? There was an explosion, but we would justly accuse the second host of great irony in the use of the term and great cleverness in his use of explosives. Obviously, he somehow rigged the whole thing in the finest detail, and we would rightly conclude his mastery of physics, chemistry, and architecture bordered on the divine.

Now what if you received an invitation: “The Big Bang: See the Universe Blown Up!” What would you witness? As it turns out, the more scientists dig into the complexities of the cosmos, the more it appears to be like the second event.

The evidence? To begin with the beginning, if the universe originated in an explosion, it was very precisely and very suspiciously calibrated down to the finest details. And further, this cosmic fine-tuning seems to be defined by a goal, the eventual existence of complex, biological life. Indeed, scientists are going even further, and arguing that the fundamental laws and forces of nature, the chemical elements and basic compounds, the 3-dimensionality of space, and more, all lead to the strange and welcome conclusion that we may well be the goal of the universe. Thus, the science of cosmology has become not just biocentric, but anthropic (from the Greek anthropos, human being).

If we could replay the cosmic tape, then, we would not see a chaotic explosion that merely scatters debris, but a well-orchestrated unfolding, a Big Bloom governed by humanly unimaginable precision. If the Bloom were compressed into a fourteen-minute tape, the first third of a minute would be dark and brooding anticipation, like the buds of flowers waiting to burst. Suddenly, there would be blinding light, and the first stable elements that had been kneaded in darkness, would emerge as the initial unfolding of the infinitely dense original bud. Over the next ten minutes, we would see the universe bloom at the speed of light, expanding in every direction even as the elements swirled and condensed into the first stars, the fiery furnaces that would forge the heavier elements needed for the ultimate intricacies of complex life.

Near the end of this phase, we would see our own solar system form. In the last three minutes of the tape, we would witness a dizzyingly rapid crescendo of creation upon Earth, with the most intricate, spiraling integration of biologic complexity in the last half minute, as species after species of living being arose, bursting forth with staccato regularity in every imaginable form occupying every imaginable nook. In the last fraction of a fraction of a second, human beings would arrive, somehow the crown and glory of the bloom, the only known creature capable of science.

Scientists now admit, almost universally, the existence of the fine-tuning that allows the bang to end in a bloom. The commonsense conclusion: our universe was “rigged” from the beginning by a very clever Master of physics, chemistry, and architecture. As physicist John Polkinghorne has said, such cosmological fine-tuning means that “the universe is indeed not ‘any old world’ but the carefully calculated construct of its Creator.”

Others resist the commonsense conclusion that the theologians were right all along. Some, like Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal at Cambridge, avoid this conclusion only by exchanging commonsense for nonsense, and conjecturing that there are a multitude of universes, and we just happen to be the lucky one.

Let us hope that, as more and more evidence of the extraordinary, providential ordering of the universe and earth itself is uncovered, that common sense will prevail.
 
 
Originally printed in To the Source. Used with author's permission.)
(Image credit: Fan Pop)