Chapter 6: The God of Abraham and Jesus
“Why does the universe bother to exist? One can of course define God as the answer to the question, but that does not advance one much unless one accepts the other connotations that are usually attached to the word “God”.”
- Stephen Hawking
While science assures us that everything is explainable, other arts would add that experience has showed us that there is reality we would never be able to explain.
“Can I believe strongly in the scientific view of the universe and at the same time believe in a God who is involved continuously in events in the universe?” Here are some answers:
1. Ignore all that religious hocus-pocus. Stick to science.
2. Believing in the God of the Bible is unsatisfactory if you appreciate the fundamental rationality of the universe. How could God be false to his own nature? Why change the apparently perfect “rules of the game”?
3. “Rational” doesn’t have to mean “legalistic” or “deterministic” (i.e. God is not breaking laws). When He created the laws, he left a space to maneuver without breaking the basic laws. There’s flexibility. The laws that God made are not deterministic.
4. What are the laws of science? Which one is God breaking? Would we reach the bed-rock laws of science? Is God breaking the law or are we misunderstanding what the law is?
5. We can’t talk about a rational universe and a rational God and fail to deal with it. There’s an apparent irrationality and arbitrariness of God; he seems to play favorites. Is God a tribal God? (“Christian bureaucracy” for example). If God intervenes, is He irrational and arbitrary?
6. God isn’t breaking any laws when he intervenes, nor is his activity senseless and inconsistent. Our scientific point of view is not the last word in rational. We can’t know the reality nor the mind of God.
7. Focus on what is happening; we have what we have. Let’s find hard evidence for the existence and active involvement of God.
The law-breaker
Sir Nevill Mott: “God relates to men and women who seek him, and that He works within natural laws.” (He cannot respect or worship a tribal God, even if He is omnipotent.)
The hard edge of legalism
Is the divine explanation contradicting scientific knowledge or breaking these laws?
Possible ways of explanation (“God stopped the sun”)
1. Physical (some think that God should not do things that could not happen as a result of natural processes; they need a scientific explanation for a miracle.)
2. Psychological (mass hallucination)
3. “It never happened” (If God can never break his own laws (legalistic universe), then this never happened.)
The soft underbelly of legalism
Legalistic approach: we become lawyers trying to show a jury that our client, God, may seem to have broken the law but, technically, hasn’t.
We must know that our laws are not bed-rock (they don’t break down in any situation), but approximations of reality, so we don’t know exactly if God has broken them.
God left plenty of room to maneuver within the laws He created. He can also act through us, we being conscious or not.
Some say that the quantum level is were divine and individual choice may reside. However, the quantum level is “govern” by deterministic equations such as the Schrödinger’s equation (maps of probability densities). “Statistical probabilities with regard to a vast number of particles govern the emergence of everyday certainties and accustomed events on the common-sense level.” (e.g. a statue can wave at you, but that has a very low probability).
Can we ever gain the understanding of why something happens and others not? What’s the role of God in this? Is God manipulating the common events and therefore has the capacity to manipulate the extremely unusual ones?
“Those who believe in God may run an additional risk with an interpretation which depends upon our continued ignorance of the reasons why certain properties and not others arise. Are the arguments we’ve been looking at examples of “God-of-the-Gaps theology?”
The death of the God-of-the-Gaps
“How much really is random about the development of the universe and what goes on in it, and how much is not?”
God-of-the-Gaps: plugging God in wherever we have gaps in our knowledge.
The failure of this theology doesn’t prove there isn’t a God, nor that we would be discouraged to not pursue the mysteries we currently find through other branches of science, such as chaos and complexity theory.
Chaos meets Control
Chaos Theory
- Science that studies randomness.
- Predictable systems are the exception, not the rule.
- Joseph Ford: “For sequences, as in nature, order is the exception, chaos the norm. The number of definable patterns is countable. The number of possibilities is not.”
- What happens when we find patterns in these chaotic systems? “Self-organization appears to be inevitable in the midst of chaos, perhaps even stronger than entropy.”
Complexity Theory
- Outgrowth of chaos theory which focuses on the borderland between the predictable and the unpredictable, the delicate balance between order and chaos.
- Neither the near future nor the distant future of a chaotic system is predictable.
Background of Chaos and Complexity
- Edward Lorenz (1961); studies of weather by computer simulations (6 vs. 3 digits). “Small events have enormous consequences.”
- “The Butterfly Effect” (“sensitive dependence on initial conditions”). “Perfect predictions are not humanly possible… it’s beyond us.”
- Pierre Simon de la Place (XVIII); (omniscient being with unlimited powers of memory and mental calculation). “Another problem with prediction has to do with knowing the laws of nature… How exact would that knowledge have to be?”
- Robert May (1971); attractor, two attractors (bifurcation), strange attractor (Lorenz; 3D – passing in front and not crossing). “The repetitions were not exact, but the pattern was recognizable.”
- Mitchell Feigenbaum, “fractals”; Benoit Mandelbrot
How small a change will make a difference in the future? Can we predict or control it?
- Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield: “Once an irreversible dynamical system has been sucked into a strange attractor, it is totally impossible to predict its long-term future behavior.” Does this means it is inherently unpredictable (the clockwork is smashed)?
- Ilya Prigogine and Isobel Stengers: “When faced with these unstable systems La Place’s (omniscient being) is just as powerless as we.”
- God (infinite knowledge and all the information).
- Degrees of accuracy of knowledge of the initial conditions (chaos)
- God setting the initial conditions (God know everything since He is not limited to the time constraint; all He has is present knowledge)
- Ford: God needn’t to control all present actions, but use probability to control an end result. (He knows the beginning and end)
- Do we have choice if God is controlling the end result?
- Is there a yet unknown organizing principle at work in the universe and are we able to find it through science? (This could leave God out)
“In a universe that combines predictability and freedom, as these theories suggest our does, insisting there was a violation of the fundamental laws of the universe might be tantamount to saying that we have violated the Constitution by allowing traffic to flow the wrong way.”
“Chaos and complexity are also providing a fresh way to understand an old paradox by allowing us to see that chance and choice, on the one hand, and necessity, on the other, are inherent properties of the universe, not in conflict, but working in tandem to allow the universe to be rational and patterned and at the same time contingent.”
“Top-down” determinism?
The more complex levels determine the less complex levels.
“If we open up the new possibility that it is the more complex levels (such as human beings or even more complex creatures yet to come) whose existence determines what the lower levels must be like and what properties must arise in them, then God might be not the simplest of all, but the most complex of all – and all the levels that might “emerge” from the most complex level …a sort of top-down creation in which not the First Cause, but the Final Cause or end-purpose dictates and constrains all that precedes it.”
“We’re suggesting that something in the future actively and consciously creates the past, and we have been searching for the creator and intervenor in the wrong direction. To make this work, time as we know it would probably have to take second billing to a larger framework of time, or timelessness.”
“I AM”
Augustine of Hippo: Talking about something before God is irrelevant because God is eternal (stands and does not pass, everything is present, there is no “time”)
God can be seeing and intervening in the whole “history” at the same instant, not constraining our free will but taking advantage of our choices and mitigating the consequences.
“The best judgment at present indicates that chronological time is only a part of a more fundamental reality.”
When truths collide
“Science and religion are, for them, two different descriptions which together give us a fuller understanding than either description alone could provide.”
“Complementarity” (wave-particle duality; Bohr). We can apply this concept to unify science and religion and tell that “neither are right” or “both are right”.
The ultimate self-confirming hypothesis
Can God be God without being at the same time the ultimate standard? Are the concepts of justice, goodness, faithfulness, self-consistency, etc. creations of the human mind?
Shall we be the ultimate judges of these concepts? Are they intrinsic to the universe?
Gottfried Leibniz: there are standards (beauty, wisdom, good) independent from God. They are stronger than God.
A self-confirming hypothesis has no explanation or reason of being, it simply is. “Its very nature is unprovable, unfalsifiable, and self-confirmed. “I AM” – full stop.”
“If the “I AM” is God, the creator and final standard of everything, we don’t have to like that God, and if he breaks his laws or seems to break his laws, we aren’t allowed to say that he can’t.”
The masterful use of parallel perfect fifths
If there’s a more fundamental reality other than science, it doesn’t mean that science is giving us a false picture. It might be that science is just a part of that fundamental reality. We can gain understanding by our scientific inquiry.
How can we not know through science that God is not being consistent with his laws?
1. If we reject evidence that cannot be confirmed publicly, we have a restricted point of view.
2. Our universe is set up for human minds. We don’t have knowledge of what we can’t handle yet.
3. Perhaps we can evolve our level of understanding, but we aren’t there yet.
4. God will reveal at some point what we can’t find by ourselves.
The laws we have may be consistent with more fundamental and basic laws, so what seems irrational (God’s intervention) may be rational and consistent.
Who is the “I” in “I AM”?
“Ultimate reality doesn’t have to suit anybody.”
“Why all this fuss then about humans thinking they know the answers or what the answers ought to be? Who else could possibly decide what is truth? I am, not by claim, but by default, my own ultimate authority on everything else.”