Science and God: The Faithful Sceptic

"When Count Joseph de aistre, that grand and passionate lover of Logic, said despairingly 'The world is without religion', he resembled those people who say rashly: 'There is no God.'
The world, in truth, is without the religion of Count Joseph de Maistre, as it is probable that such a God as the majority of Atheist conceive does not exist." - The Key of The Mysteries, Eliphas Levi

So What I would like to know is this: is it possible that the idea that the concept of God is unscientific, and that the existence of God can therefore never play a part in our scientific understanding of the world, is based on a misconception on the part of science as to what the term 'God' actually means; or can Science and God never be reconciled?

Science and Materialism generally go hand in hand, and may sem to many people as if they are natural bed fellows. The attitude of science is often described by the analogy of the 'clockwork universe' - the idea that the universe can be explained entirely in terms of the interactions between physical bodies. And it is fundamental to the philosophy of science that we only accept the existence of things for which we have direct evidence. Therefore science is materialistic inthat it does not accept the existence of anything beyond the material world, such as, for example, the spiritual realms with which religion is concerned.

Given the clear relationship betwen science and materialism the assertion which I am going to make here may initially seem foolish, but stay with me and give me a chance to explain. I think that a strong case can be made that the concept of materialism is fundamentally unscientific, and that 'scientific materialism' is therefore a contradiction in terms.

This assertion is based on the same foundations as science itself- the philosophy of radical doubt, first put forward by Rene Descartes and later expanded upo by Schopenhauer. This extreme scepticism states that we should doubt everything that can be doubted, and only accept as true those things for which we have direct evidence. It was this philosophy whichn removed all assumptions, religious beleifs and dogmas and so on from the field of enquiry, thus establishing science as we know it. It is this radical doubt which establishes the certainty of scientific knowledge and distinguishes it from the speculations of philosophy and the mysteries of religion and spirituality

But it is also this radical doubt which should exclude materialism from the language of science. In the words of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:
"We do not know a sun, only an eye which sees a sun;
and we do not know an earth, only a hand which feels the earth"
in other words all of human experience consists of mental perception. The idea that there exists a material universe, independent of our perception, is purely speculation - dogma of science, if you like.
Not only is there no evidence for such a thing, but ther never could be any evidence for it. It is my assertion therefore that the whole concept of materialism is utterly antithetical to science, and that, as the title of this article suggests, scientific materialism is an oxymoron. What do you think?

The previous sections have been, I guess you could say, written as if they are looking in on science from the perspective of spirituality. For this next section I would like to reverse that, beginning with science and looking towards the dawn of the spirit on the horizon.

Quantum physics is a very strange science indeed - hence the title - and in many ways the worldview it suggests is closer to that of the mystic than the mechanic. The days of the 'clockwork universe', where science conceived of the universe as a giant machine are over, and the truth is much more interesting.

Here are a couple of quotes chosen to highlight how science is approaching the ground previously occupied by spirituality:

"In atomic physics the obsered phenomena can be understood only as correlations between various processes of observation and measurement, and the end of this chain of processes lies always in the consciousness of the human observer. The crucial feature of quantum theory is that the observer is not only necessary t observe the properties of an atomic phenomenon, but is necessary even to bring about these properties...
The fact that all the properties of particles are determined by priniciples closely related to the methods of observation would mean that the basic structures of the material world are determined, ultimately, by the way we look at this world; that the observed patterns of matter are reflections of patterns of mind" (The Turning Point, F. Capra)

"That this is so is one of the fundamental tenets of Eastern philosophy. The Eastern mystics tell us again and again that all things which we perceive are creations of the mind, arising from a particular state of consciousness and dissolving again if this state is transcended (as also gnostic christians taught - Ed. note)." - (The Tao of Physics - F.Capra). Hinduism holds that all shapes and structures around us are created by a mind under the spell of maya, and it regards our tendency to attatch deep significance to them as the basic human illusion. Buddhists call this illusion Avidya, or ignorance, and see it as the state of a 'defiled' mind.

You would have to be a fool to try to summarize quantum physics in a couple of paragraphs, so it's a good job I am one.
We are all familiar with the classical view of the universe as being built up from tiny little building blocks of matter called atoms. But at the sub-atomic level this concept of fundamental units of matter begins to break down. It turns out that sub-atomic 'particles' are also capable of manifesting themselves as waves. The consensus interpretation among physicists say that these are waves of probability. This means that these entities do not actualy exist in any particular place or time, but only have varying tendencies to be in many different places spread out over the area that the wave occupies. This is called the wave-particle duality; don't try to understand it (it's just to weird for that), just accept that it is true.
And here is where it gets really strange: The only thing which makes a particle acquire a finite location, or momentum, is when it is observed. When you are not looking it becomes smeared out in a wave of probability, and if you look for this wave then you can measure it and record it, but if you look for a particle then the wave disapears and it becomes a particle instead. That is what was being refered to in the section above when Capra says "properties of particles are determined by priniciples closely related to the methods of observation" - it is called the 'collapse of the wave-function'.
Generally the philosophical implications of this are ignored by physicists, because if they are honest it doesn't make any more sense to them that it does to you or me. But this does raise an interesting question: As professor Stephen Hawking himself has written, this 'collapse to the wave-function' seems to suggest that there must be a conscious observer outside of the universe to collapse the whole wave-funtion and bring the universe into existence. Without this the universe could never have devoloped any finited, quantifiable characteristics. Hawking raises this issue as part of an argument for revising the conventional interpretation, but I would like to suggest something else entirely: Perhaps the conventional interpretation is correct, and perhaps quantum physics has already proven the necessity of the existence of god.