Why do Science and Religion always seem to oppose eachother? As a child, it was very confusing to see Religion
contradict Science and vice versa. I was
raised to revere Science with the same zeal I encountered on Sundays in the
most dedicated members of my Church. For
me both Science and Religion alone fell short of explaining
life’s many mysteries. True understanding
of the universe must account for spiritual and scientific points of view alike. Why
does one have to be wrong for the other to be right? Just as genius can compromise one’s social
abilities, I suspect that complete dedication to scientific thinking can impair
one’s ability to connect with the spiritual realm. On the other hand, to deny information
available from scientific investigation thwarts our ability to see how the
spiritual truly interacts with the physical world.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards
and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our
own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I
believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble
souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms. (Albert
Einstein)
This quote from Albert Einstein lays out my two biggest
stumbling blocks when it comes to Western organized religion. First, it defies all logic that God could be
perfect unconditional love, yet also a tyrranical slavedriver. A couple of years in Sunday school is all a
child needs to uncover vast layers of inconsistency and hypocrisy in the
traditional presentation of the Bible.
Second, the need to understand Death results in ridiculously implausible
scenarios to explain this phenomenon. Fear
of change is the single most important impediment to human progress. Dying is the ultimate change of life
circumstances. It makes sense then, that
providing a comforting explanation for how death turns out would be of the
utmost importance in any human culture.
Unfortunately, blind determination to cling to an outdated, imperfect
model is causing human conciousness to stagnate because it closes peoples’ eyes
to new information.
So what is particle or quantum physics and does it hold the
answer to the age old questions, how did we get here and did God have a part in
it? I decided to read Stephen Hawking’s
“The Grand Design” which promised to explain Physics’ take on the creation of
the Universe in layman’s terms. On the
first page of the book I ran into something I did not agree with, “Philosophy
is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with
modern developments in science.” (5)
Then, a few pages further in, he goes on to write, “Ignorance of
nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over in
every aspect of human life.” (17) I had to put the book down for a few moments,
upset by the immediate presentation of conflict between scientific discovery
and spiritual explorations. But after
all, this is what I was investigasting. I
dove back in and learned how these statements were valid from Hawking’s purely
scientific standpoint.
Hawking begins in 585 BC, with the ancient Greeks and the
birth of Ionian Science. At this point
in history, Science and Mathematics were fields of philosophic thought and the
Ionians were one of many schools of early Greek philospohy. In their view, the world could be understood
by a set of natural laws, discernable through observation and reason. They are credited with the first prediction
of a solar eclipse by a man called Thales. Pythagorus (ca 500 BC), the most famous
Ionian philosopher, used mathematics to identify the relationship between the
length of strings and the harmonic combinations of sound they produced. Next, around 400 BC, another Ionian named
Democritus deduced the existence of the atom (from the Greek ‘uncuttable’), by
intuiting that objects can not be cut into infinitely smaller and smaller
pieces. Finally, towards the end of the
Ionian age, around 300 BC, Aristarchus first conceived of a heliocentric model
of the universe, where the earth revolves around the sun.
These ideas were all consistent with what we now know to be
true about nature from the atomic to the planetary scales, but these ideas were
dropped and not revisited for another 2000 years! Aristotle (350 BC) could not accept the
concept of atoms because it implied that human beings were souless, inanimate
objects. He engendered the tradition of
explaining all natural phenomenon as an intentional compliance with God’s will,
which ordered the universe to revolve around the human soul. Hawking posits
that Aristotle was the champion of, “the ancients’ focus on why Nature behaves as it does, rather
than how it behaves.” (p. 23) Thus, the heliocentric model was abandoned until
Copernicus restated it in 1543. By this time, the
Catholic Church had adopted Ptolemy’s model of an earth-centered universe (ca
150 AD). So when Galileo advocated
the Copernican model, he was condemned for heresy in 1633 a mistake for which the Roman Catholic
Church did not acknowledge fault until 1992.
Religious thinking dominated peoples’ understanding of
Nature through the 17th century. Chrisitan thinkers maintained that God could
intervene in nature to work miracles. According
to French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, natural laws are
unalterable, but are a reflection of God’s own intrinsic nature. Descartes felt that God set the world in
motion, then left it entirely alone. These ideas introduced modern Science's view that natural laws are not subject to divine intervention. A
similar position was adopted by Isaac Newton (1643-1727) – author of the laws
of motion and gravity which accounted for the orbits of the earth, moon, and planets
down to phenomena such as the tides.
Newton accounted for gaps in his understanding of gravity by viewing God
as a heavenly watchmaker, who ‘wound the celestial clocks.’ Again, the idea that God set things in motion, but then the universe ran like clockwork. To preserve the idea of free will, Descartes asserted
that the soul is not subject to scientific law.
The human mind was something different from the physical world and did
not follow its laws. Ergo his famous
quote: “I think, therefore I am.”
Newton’s laws and the birth of classical physics mark the
point at which science begins a severe divergence from theological and
philosophical thought. Aristotle believed that the laws of nature
originated in logic. Therefore one
should be able to deduce these laws without the painstaking collection of
empirical and measureable data demanded by the scientific method. He theorized that the world is made of four
elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Although
all four of these entities exhibit very different properties, we now have a far
more detailed picture of the basic building blocks of our world thanks to the
discovery of the elements in the periodic table. In "The Grand Design" Hawking describes the evolution of Physics
from Newton's laws of gravity and motion in the 17th century to the present day M-theory, which if proved, would unite all previous scientific models into one
unified theory. It is worth noting that his treatment of philosophy ends with Descartes and does not explore the advances made in that field over the last four centuries.
Scientists have continually reconceptualized the fundamental
constituents of the universe with each subsequent theory or model. For example, Newton originally conceived of
light as made up of particles, but when observed its refractions through glass
lenses, determined it must behave as a wave. In 1860 James Maxwell determined that
electricity, magnetism and light are all manifestations of the electromagnetic
field and that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave. Microwaves, radio waves, infrared light,
X-rays and different colors of light differ only in their wavelengths. Our sun radiates at all wavelengths, but its
radiation is most intense in the wavelengths we can see. Our eyes evolved to
see in the range of electromagnetic radiation most available to them. (91) In the early 1900's, Einstein discovered the photoelectric
effect, used in the technology of televisions and digital cameras. This confirmed that light was also made up of
particles (photons). It turns out that Newton was right
all along, because light behaves as both a particle and a wave.
According to Newton’s theory of gravity, objects are
attracted to each other by a force dependent on the distance between them at a
given time. In a three dimensional,
Newtonian world, objects move in straight lines, unless acted on by a force,
like gravity. In Einstein’s theory of
relativity however, gravity is not a force, but rather a result of space being warped by the matter and energy present in it. Einstein’s relativity also proposed that time is
not flat and linear, but an entire fourth dimension. In Einstein’s four
dimensional world, objects move on geodesics or curved lines, like the path an
airplane takes when traversing the globe. In the absence of matter, which
causes curvature, the geodesics in four dimensional space-time correspond to
lines in three-dimensional space. When
matter is present it distorts space-time and the paths of the bodies in the
corresponding three-dimensional space curve in a manner that Newton explained
by the attraction of gravity. (102)
Einstein and Newton’s theories are classical and apply to objects we can see, but not
to how particles behave. To
understand how the universe began we must understand how things work on the
quantum level. Quantum physics provides
a framework for understanding how nature operates on atomic and subatomic
scales. Newton’s laws describe the behavior of the composite structures that form
our everyday world. According to
Newtonian (classical) physics, objects take a single well-defined path from A
to B. Richard Feynman, the forefather of
quantum physics asserted that particles take every possible path simultaneously
to travel from A to B. To envision this, think about how dust motes float through air whereas a rock behaves very differently when kicked or thrown.
In 1929 Edwin Hubble published his conclusion that the
universe is expanding and that nearly all galaxies are moving away from
us. The farther away they are, the
faster they are moving. His findings
disproved the popular conception of the universe as static. It follows that we can extrapolate far enough
backwards to arrive at the event known as the Big Bang. At its origin, the universe is believed to have existed on the quantum scale, at the size of a particle. Einstein’s general relativity predicts a time
where the temperature, density, and curvature of the universe are all infinite,
a situation mathematicians call singularity.
To a physicist however, Einstein’s theory breaks down here, because it is not possible that the universe could be cut into infinitely smaller pieces, the same way Aristarchus determined the existence of the atom. Thus classical theories cannot predict how the universe began, only how it evolved afterward. Therefore we need both quantum theory and
relativity to understand the origin of the universe, because it started on the atomic level.
Quantum physics introduces the principle that gravity warps
time and space just as relativity shows that matter and energy warp space. Warpage of space stretches and compresses the distance
between points, changing the geometry or shape of space. Warpage of time stretches or compresses time
intervals in a similar manner, to the point where time and space can become intertwined. Our understanding of time’s beginning is like our idea that
the earth is flat, centuries ago. At
first, time was believed to be linear.
Then, Einstein’s theory of relativity unified time and space into
space-time, but time was still different from space, with either a beginning and an end, or going on infinitely.
However, once we add the effects of quantum theory to relativity,
warpage causes time to behave like another dimension of space. Thus, in the early universe, time as we know
it does not exist, but rather there were four dimensions of space and none of
time. Interestingly, an early Christian
philosopher, St. Augustine (354-430 AD), said that time was a property of the
world that God created and that time did not exist before the creation.
Discovery
of the Higgs boson plays a crucial role in providing proof of super-symmetry -
an essential ingredient of M-Theory. (Source: CERN) Supersymmetry came on
the scientific scene in 1976. One of the
important assumptions of supersymmetry is that force particles and matter particles
are really just two facets of the same thing.
Most physicists also believe that supersymmetry will show that gravity is another manifestation of the 3 other identified forces of nature (elctromagnetism, weak
nuclear force, and strong nuclear force).
The second important part of M-theory is String theory. According to string theory, particles are not
points, but patterns of vibration that have only length, no height or width. Also, they are consistent only if space-time
has ten dimensions, rather than four. These
extra dimensions are viewed as ‘curled up’ whereas the four known dimensions of space-time
are ‘rolled out.’ In 1994, scientists
discovered many different string theories, but it is suspected that they are all just different ways of describing the
curvature of the extra dimensions in terms of four dimensional space. String theorists are now convinced that the
five different string theories and supersymmetry are just different
approximations of a more fundamental theory : M Theory, where the M could stand
for Master, Mystery, or Miracle. Hawking concludes his book:
M-theory is the unified theory, a complete theory of the universe. The true
miracle is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that
predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see.
If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the sucessful conclusion of
a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design. (181)
miracle is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that
predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see.
If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the sucessful conclusion of
a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design. (181)
After
reading Hawking’s book, I realized that theological thought has not advanced at the same rate that scientific thought has. Yet, I believe in the Spiritual just as I believe in Science. I have empirical and measurable proof of
God's existence. I know the power my faith has
had in my life and I see the miracles it has worked in the lives of other
people who believe. I know instinctively
that Science and Spirituality can and must coexist. I think of Pythagorus, the Ionian scientist
who derived a mathematical explanation for the sound string instruments make. Science explains the frequencies of the sound waves and God explains the waves of emotion that go through me when I hear a
cello played.
I would like
to propose a unified theory of religion, like the M-theory Hawking argues for
the field of Physics where it looks like everything is related, perhaps different manifestations of the same basic principles. What if we are all
praying to the same God, just within the parameters set out by our own culture
and historical time period? Perhaps love, hope, and appreciation of beauty are all wavelengths of a spiritual forcefield. If we could apply the same amount of collective energy to spiritual explorations as the Scientific community has across the globe, what would we find?
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