This
article, written by Robert H. Nelson, was published on Wednesday 17 May at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/existence-of-god-rational-arguments-mathematics-human-consciousness-a7739841.html.
It was originally published in ‘The Conversation.’ Robert H. Nelson, Professor
of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, explains his conviction that
god exists at a time when 33 per cent of people in the US and 39 per cent of
the UK consider themselves atheists.
Although
it is an excellent article, Professor Nelson fails to make the vital step in
recognising that God is the creator and, far from being an abstract being and
One that we can theorise about, God is wanting to come into relationship with
us.
Please
also note that I do not accept macro-natural selection, although I do accept
micro-natural selection.
The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the
21st century. According to a Pew Survey, the percent of Americans
having no religious affiliation reached 23 per cent in 2014. Among such ‘nones,’
33 per cent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 per cent increase
since only 2007. Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would
argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been
rising. In my 2015 book, God? Very
Probably: Five Rational Whys to Think about the Question of a God, I look
at physics, the philosophy of human consciousness, evolutionary biology,
mathematics, the history of religion and theology to explore whether such a god
exists. I should say that I am trained originally as an economist, but have
been working at the intersection of economics, environmentalism and theology
since the 1990s.
Laws of math
In 1960 the Princeton physicist – and subsequent Nobel
Prize winner – Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural
world – as far as we know – obey laws of mathematics?
As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben
Hersh, mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of
mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical
laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the
rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.
But modern mathematics generally formulated before any
natural observations are made, and many mathematical laws today have no known
existing physical analogues.
Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, for example,
was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great
German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical
applications at the time of its intellectual creation.
In some cases the physicist also discovers the mathematics.
Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as
physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in
finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He
found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of
calculus.
At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newton’s
conclusions because they seemed to be “occult.”
How could two distinct objects
in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical
law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation,
but in the end he could say only that it is the will of God.
Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics,
little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, “the enormous usefulness of
mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and
there is no rational explanation for it.”
In other words, as I argue in my book, it takes the
existence of some kind of god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the
universe comprehensible.
Math
and other worlds
In 2004 the great British physicist Roger Penrose put forward
a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds –
mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged,
it was a complete puzzle to him how the three interacted with one another
outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model.
How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create
something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence:
human consciousness?
It is a mystery that lies beyond science.
This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek
worldview of Plato, who believed that the abstract ideas (above all
mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The material world
that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of
these prior formal ideas. As the scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Ian
Mueller, writes in Mathematics and the
Divine, “the real of such ideas is that of God.”
Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Mex Tegmark argues in Our Mathematical Universe that mathematics
is the fundamental world reality that drives the universe. As I would say,
mathematics is operating in a god-like fashion.
The mystery
of human consciousness
The workings of human consciousness are similarly
miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical
presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable
dimensions.
Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide
the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically
explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical
constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.
Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of
human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since
the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.
Recognising that he could not reconcile his own scientific
materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a
leading atheist Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that
consciousness even exists.
Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do,
another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the
scientifically inexplicable – the “intractable” - character of human consciousness, “we will to
leave [scientific] materialism behind” as a complete basis for understanding
the world of human existence.
As an atheist, Nagel does not offer religious belief as an
alternative, but I would argue that the supernatural character of the workings
of human consciousness adds grounds for raising the probability of the existence
of a supernatural god.
Evolution
and faith
Evolution is a contentious subject in American public life.
According to Pew, 98 per cent of scientists connected to the American
Association for the Advancement of Science “believe humans evolved over time”
while only a minority of Americans “fully accept evolution through natural
selection.”
As I say in my book, I should emphasise that I am not
questioning the reality of natural biological evolution.
What is interesting to me, however, are the
fierce arguments that have taken place between professional evolutionary biologists.
A number of developments in evolutionary theory have,”
In 2011, the
University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro argued that,
remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by
purposeful “sentience” of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves. “The
capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable,” he
wrote. “Our current ideas about evolution have to incorporate the basic fact of
life.”
A number of scientists, such as Francis Collins, director
of the US National Institute of Health, “see no conflict between believing in
God and accepting the contemporary theory of evolution,” as the American Association
for the Advancement of Science points out.
For my part, the most recent developments in evolutionary
biology have increased the probability of a god.
Miraculous
ideas at the same time?
For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important
changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring
in the realm of human ideas.
In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 BC),
world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of
Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared
at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in
the Middle East, groups having little interaction with one another.
The development of the scientific method in the 17th
century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a
set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical
theories, but none capable, I would argue, of explaining as fundamentally
transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a
revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in
scientific materialism, that drove the process. That these astonishing things
happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside
physical reality, offers further rational evidence, in my view, for the
conclusion that human beings may well be made “in the image of [a] God.”
Different
forms of worship
In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the
American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that, ”Everybody
worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion
of religion, his followers, ironically, worshipped Marxism. The American
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th
century, Marxism was the “historical successor of Christianity,” claiming to
show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.
In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and
other such ‘economic religions’ were characteristic of much of the modern age.
So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in
many such disguised forms of “secular religion.”
That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed
such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual
and other radical changes of the modern age is another reason I offer for
thinking that the evidence of a god is very probable.
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