Overview
This scientific fact led to what physicalists rejected as a very unscientific theory, the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). According to that theory, the universe was designed by God, or at least by a creative force which seems to be God, a force that exhibits intelligence and intent, as well as being all powerful.
= = = = =
Mankind’s
search for truth has never been more urgent than it is now. We have taken into our hands the power to
make of earth a paradise or a hell. We
must choose a path, and soon. Do we have
the wisdom to choose wisely?
There are
many paths to choose from, including political, economic and social avenues
into the future. One path is that we do
nothing, and allow events to unfold as they will, but as events become more
complex and dangerous, the path of doing nothing is almost surely one that
leads off a cliff.
Whatever
path we choose, it will rely on an underlying truth, a philosophy, a
paradigm. Some say there is no truth,
others say there are many truths.
Neither of those lights the way through the darkness. There is truth, and it is the one truth, our
only hope. What is it?
This
commentary will deal with the three major paradigms, the three that are most
familiar, and which are most supported by fact, reason, and human nature. They are known by many names, but we will
simplify. They are the paradigms of the
physical, the divine, and the mind.
1.
The physical paradigm, which we will
refer to as physicalism, is probably the most familiar. It deals with the physical world as we see
it, and as science describes it.
2.
The divine paradigm describes the
physical world as the creation of God, and proposes a larger world of spirit. We shall refer to it as the God paradigm, and
abbreviate it as TGP.
3.
The mind paradigm is the least familiar
to most Western people, and therefore cannot be adequately summarized in bullet
statements. It proposes a universal,
collective consciousness of which we are all a part. Some proponents hold that consciousness is
the only thing that exists. Others say
that everything that exists is dependent on consciousness.
The Physicalist Paradigm
According to
physicalism, the only thing that exists is physical reality. There is nothing else. Human beings are unintended byproducts of
physics. Physicalism denies the
existence of God, soul or spirit, and regards life as nothing more than a
chemical process. It defines
consciousness only in terms of its external appearance, but offers no
explanation of our inward experience of consciousness. Physicalism denies that we have free will. According to physicalism, free will is an
utter impossibility, since it could override the inexorable chain of cause and
effect, a chain which physicalism requires, else it fails to be true.
The God Paradigm
Most Western
people today are familiar with the concept that the Supreme Being created the
world and all that is in it, including us. God is all powerful and all
knowing. The specific God paradigm
discussed in this commentary is the one expressed in the Bible, as taught by
Evangelical Christians, and as more specifically elucidated in the
self-published book by this author, titled, The
God Paradigm.
The mind paradigm
This one is the
least familiar to most Western people, and will therefore require a more
extensive explanation. There are various
schools of thought within the mind paradigm.
They incorporate a way of thinking that is more like the
Hindu-Buddhist-Taoist philosophies of the East, than to Western ways of
thinking. The basic idea is that, the
only thing we really know of a certainty is that we are conscious. We have conscious experiences. If we accept only physical terms, our
experiences come to us from physical sources, through our nervous system, and
into our brains—but some versions of the mind paradigm reject all that, and
skip directly to the conscious experience itself. Our conscious experiences are said to be
solely the product of vibrations within the universal, collective consciousness
itself. Each of us is a part of that
collective consciousness, but only temporarily separated from it. Eventually, in some versions, we will all
melt back into it.
= = = = =
Chapter 1—Physical Reality
It would
seem that there is very little to explain.
Each day, our lives are dominated by physical necessities. We must breathe air, drink water, and eat
food. Otherwise, we perish.
But, in
fact, there is very much to explain.
Physical reality is the subject of physics, and related sciences. It tells us that the world is made of substance,
existing within space, and acted upon by natural forces.
Physicalism
is not the same as physics. Physicalism
is a philosophy, and the one which dominates the thinking of many premier
scientists. According to physicalism,
everything in physical nature can be explained by—and only by—other things in
physical nature. There is nothing else,
only physical nature.
Physicalism
does not attribute to the universe any supernatural concept of planning,
purpose or meaning. And while the
question of origins is investigated by scientists, it is taken for granted that
if nature did have a beginning, it came about by natural means, even if we can
never know what those natural means were.
In
physicalism, human beings have no special place. We are incidental byproducts of nature. The late paleontologist George Gaylord
Simpson, is quoted as having said that, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not
have him in mind. He was not planned.”
All of this
was, for centuries, the accepted view of many scientists. For centuries, physical science grew in
prestige and credibility as, one by one, it showed that natural phenomena were
explained by other natural phenomena.
Volcanoes and thunderstorms could be explained without reference to any
God or gods. Moreover, physical science
was applied to the invention of wondrous new gadgets, from the steam engine to
nuclear power. Today we live in a world
in which small children grow up using computers and cell phones, traveling in
automobiles and airplanes, and being protected from the ravages of terrible
diseases that once devastated entire populations.
Any
challenges to physicalism are often met with condescension, ridicule or even
scorn. Whenever religion or philosophy
presents any challenge to physicalism, the physicalists are sure to mention
technology as overpowering evidence that they are correct. With all this, it seems that physicalism
wins, hands down, no contest.
But wait—not
so fast. In a sense, science itself has
begun to undo the physicalist paradigm.
The first hints that something might be fatally flawed in conventional physicalist
thinking came from the early twentieth century findings in a new science called
quantum physics (often called, quantum mechanics, or QM).
QM’s
experiments introduced radically new ways of thinking into the institutions of
science. They came roughly concurrently
with Einstein’s theories of relativity, which also shocked scientists into new
ways of thinking.
Suddenly,
space and time were no longer seen as the separate settings they once had
seemed, settings within which the actors of nature moved about on the cosmic
stage. Relativity made space-time and
energy-mass into very strange components of the universe. No less a shock came from QM. Perhaps the iconic theory of QM was the Uncertainty Principle, which relies heavily
upon a form of probability that had never before been encountered.
The
uncertainty principle says that the location and velocity of an electron cannot
both be known at the same time. The key
point in this principle is not that our methods cannot reveal both of these
things at the same time, but perplexingly, that they do not both exist at the
same time. The more velocity an electron
has, the less precise its location actually is, and vice versa. No amount of measurement, no matter how
accurate, can reveal both at the same time, because the more of one there is,
the less of the other there is.
But, you may
ask, if an electron with a known velocity does not have a precise location,
then where is it?
That is
where this new form of probability enters the picture. Our normal experience with probability can be
illustrated with a deck of shuffled cards.
If we guess at which card is now on top of the deck, we have a small
chance of being correct. But, we can
cheat, and look at the top card, and know what it is. Our inability to know before looking was not
because the card itself was uncertain—only in our mind were we uncertain, but
in a manner of speaking, nature knew exactly which card was on top.
But the
inside of an atom is such that, not even nature knows where the electron is. It is not in any precise location until the
instant it is detected. Before that, the
electron is a cloud of probability. It
could be anywhere. Once detected, its
probability collapses into certainty, into a known location.
If there
were such a thing as a quantum deck of cards, even cheating would not reveal
which card was on top of the deck. The
cards would have no specific identity—they would be a fog—until we looked, and
at the instant we looked at a card, it could become any of the cards, not just
the one we previously cheated with. It
would be as if all the cards were being constantly shuffled.
Thus, we have
two different kinds of probability.
The actual
location of an electron, before it is detected, is a probability wave. The wave is tall in the center, and then
decreases as one gets farther from the center.
At the center, there is a high probability that the electron will be
found there. The farther one is from the
center, the less likely that the electron will be found there, but the
probability never falls to zero, not until the probability wave is collapsed by
measuring it, at which time the location of the electron becomes a certainty.
Remember
that the probability wave is not like the probability of finding a card in a
deck. Nature always knows where every
card is. But nature does not know where
the electron is until its probability wave is collapsed. There literally is no “where,” no specific
location.
It is this
pure form of randomness, as opposed to the pseudo-randomness of the cards, that
is at the core of quantum theory. It is
so revolutionary that not even Einstein agreed that it could be real. But every experiment designed to disprove QM
has either failed to do so, or instead supported it.
The famous
double-slit experiment (DSE) has been repeated numerous times, to illustrate
quantum uncertainty. More specifically,
the DSE at first sought to discover whether the electron is a wave or a
particle. The answer astounded
scientists, for the answer to the question depends on whether the electron’s
path of travel is observed or not. When
we are looking at an electron as it travels, it behaves as a particle. When we are not looking at its path of
travel, it behaves as a wave.
What this
did to physicalism was to challenge its dogma of everything being composed only
of substance. Human consciousness
suddenly became not a philosophical mystery, but a fundamental fact of nature,
a factor that operates as a sort of force, measurable and subject to repeatable
experiments by skeptics. Human
consciousness can dictate the behavior of electrons.
The problem
for physicalism then became to explain consciousness in physical terms. The problem is all the greater, because we do
not experience consciousness in objective
physical terms, but rather, subjectively.
Our inward experience of consciousness is very real, having physical
effects, but it is without physical explanation.
Nor do the
scientific problems for physicalism end there.
They become only greater. Quantum
randomness, it seems, operates not only at the smallest scales, those of the
atom, but also at the largest scales, those of the entire cosmos.
The problem
that plagues physicalism at the cosmic scale is something called, the Fine-Tuning
Problem. The universe is structured
around a set of mathematical values called constants. The gravitational constant determines the
strength of gravity. The lightspeed
constant sets the speed of light. Other
constants determine the strength of forces holding atoms together. Altogether, there are 27 physical constants
that define the physical properties of the universe.
One way of
thinking about this is to imagine a large jet airliner. There are a number of physical values that
have to be present to allow the aircraft to fly. The wings must be of a certain shape, of a certain
strength, and of a certain size and weight.
The engines must be made of the right materials, organized into the
precise arrangement needed to power the aircraft. None of this can be left to chance. Change any one of the 27 most critical
parameters of the aircraft, and it will either perform very poorly, or more
likely, never be able to fly at all. No
jet airliner could be produced by chance alone.
Yet,
according to QM, the values of the constants that define our universe are
indeed left to chance, quantum chance, determined entirely at random. Even the physicalists recognized that this
could not be. The chances of our
universe forming at random, and yet having more precision than any jet
airliner, are less than the chance of randomly selecting one particular grain
of sand on the entire earth—a statistical zero.
This scientific fact led to what physicalists rejected as a very unscientific theory, the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). According to that theory, the universe was designed by God, or at least by a creative force which seems to be God, a force that exhibits intelligence and intent, as well as being all powerful.
Physicalists
would not accept that, and instead developed a theory that is both
unscientific, and has less evidence for it than does ID. What the physicalists say is that, even if
the chances of our universe having the exact set of constants needed for it to
support intelligent life, civilization and technology—even if those chances are
less than one in a kazillion kazillions—that result can be achieved—at random—if
you have an unlimited number of universes.
If so, then the chances of our universe being formed become dramatically
large, approaching one hundred percent.
They call
this, the Many Universes Theory, or the multi-verse. This theory proposes that there are vast
numbers of universes, perhaps infinites of them. With so many universes, it is not surprising
that one of them is exactly right for life, just as our universe is. Problem solved, right?
No. Not only does multi-verse theory not make our
universe more probable, it makes it less probable. Here are two reasons why.
1.
In order
for randomness to operate, it requires nonrandom parameters. We can show this by posing a simple
situation, the roll of a die (singular of dice). What are the chances that a die roll will
land as a “six?” Is it one in six? Trick question! What if the die has only four sides? What if it has more than six sides? Dice are not produced at random. They are intentionally designed for a
purpose, not with just any number of sides, but with a number of sides decided
by the maker. Our universe has 27
constants. If the values of those
constants are within certain ranges, why those ranges, and not greater or
smaller ones? And why does it have
27? Why not more, or less? No matter how you try, you cannot avoid
intelligent design.
2.
If our one universe is so unlikely to exist
based on chance, then how much less likely is it that a multi-verse can
exist? How many parameters does it
have? What are the ranges of its
values? And is the supposed multi-verse
itself just a small part of an even greater structure of mega-multi-verses? How many levels of multi-multi-verses will it
take to produce our one universe?
Some very
esteemed scientists have proposed that there are an infinite number of
universes. But if so, then the absurd
result is that, as one scientist said, “Anything that can happen, must happen,
and it must happen an infinite number of times.”
This is, if
one thinks about it, the same as saying that nothing ever happens. If the coin lands both heads and tails, then
flipping it has produced no result.
= = = = =
Chapter 2—The God Paradigm
Billions of
people believe that physical reality was created by God, or a god or gods. But are they right?
Instead of
leaving it to chance, many people believe that, as Genesis 1:1 says, “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
The God
paradigm does not deny that physical reality exists. It simply says that physical reality is not
all that there is. There is a higher order
of reality.
There is a
physical basis, in addition to a spiritual one, to support the claim that the
universe is designed, intelligently and purposefully, by the Supreme Being, the
Creator. The most obvious one is that
the universe looks like it was
designed. It is so finely tuned to
support life, civilization and technology, that the most obvious conclusion is
that the universe is the work of God.
However,
since physicalism avers that it all came about by chance, after kazillions of
rolls of the dice, it is necessary (to satisfy the physicalists) to mention
three things for which physicalism has no explanation. These are:
life, consciousness and free will.
--1-- Life. But, wait, you say, the science of biology
has adequately explained life as a chemical process, hasn’t it? No, it has not. Biochemistry describes the mechanics of
living creatures, but it fails to explain numerous facts about living things. While the concept of a life force has been
discarded by science, it becomes clear from physics and cosmology that the
entire universe is a life force. This
can be shown to be true, because everything about the physical universe is
precisely and exactingly fine tuned to bring about living things, and to
sustain them and support them. Even with
all that we know about physics, there is nothing in science that makes life a
necessity. TGP says that life is not a
byproduct of the universe, but that it is a fundamental reality, a basis around
which the universe is designed. Physics
does not give rise to life, but rather, in a sense, it is the other way
around. But there is more, because life
is the basis for our consciousness and free will, two realities for which
physicalism has no viable explanation at all.
--2-- Consciousness. If physicalism has only a weak explanation
for life, it has none at all for consciousness.
Physicalists have attempted to explain life and consciousness as
emergent phenomena, arising from complexity.
However, there is no physical definition of complexity. Nature does not differentiate between a house
and a pile of rubble. The difference
lies in our conscious perception. A
house is a pile of rubble that has been consciously arranged, according to a
plan and purpose. This is true even
though the materials in a house and in a pile of rubble can be exactly the
same.
Regarding
consciousness, it is vital to distinguish between the outward appearance of
consciousness, and its inward experience.
The outward appearance can be measured by various medical procedures,
but nothing in the physicalist’s world can explain your inward experience of
consciousness. An illustration of this
is color. Physics can define color in
terms of photons and wavelength. But
when you see a color, you do not experience it in quantifiable terms. You cannot explain what color is to a person
who has been blind from birth, who has never experienced color for
himself. Nor does physics have any
explanation whatsoever for how those photons and wavelengths, passing through
your eyes, become experienced as the color you actually perceive.
--3-- Free Will. Nothing in physicalism is compatible with
free will. Physicalism denies that free
will can exist. Free will empowers the
individual to make decisions, regardless of the physical chain of
cause-and-effect that governs all natural phenomena. Even Sean Carroll, one of the foremost
advocates of physicalism, allowed that without free will, we would have no
power of reason. Without life,
consciousness and free will, we would be helpless witnesses of our own lives,
but not participants. We would be puppets
on a cosmic string, mindless actors on a stage, reciting lines in a script that
nobody wrote. To paraphrase Shakespeare,
our lives would be “a sound and fury signifying nothing,” in “a tale told by an
idiot.”
Without free
will, there could be neither vice nor virtue, neither courage nor
cowardice. There could be no justice,
for the criminal could disavow any responsibility for his actions, while the
judge could say he had no power of the will when sentencing him. Life would be a farce. Those who deny that free will exists
implicitly aver that they have no power but to deny it, and at the same time,
they aver that those of us who profess free will cannot help but do so.
Without free
will—quoting from the 1969 hit song by Zager and Evans— “Everything you think
do and say, is in the pill you took today.”
(In the year 2525)
Denial of
free will would make of human life a meaningless and absurd farce, but that is
precisely what physicalism says. It is a
futile, and even dangerous, philosophy.
Much more
about the God paradigm is in the book
by that name.
Chapter 3—The Mind Paradigm, Cosmic
Consciousness
While
physical and religious philosophies are familiar to most people in Western
cultures, the philosophies of the East are much less so.
Many Eastern
sages regard the physical world as an illusion, at least in the sense that when
we see something material, we are not seeing the object as it really is, but
only as a representation of it. They
also refer to the illusion of self, and seek through enlightenment to sublimate
the self into the larger consciousness.
The mind
paradigm called Idealism is a further refinement of Eastern philosophy,
elucidated by Bernardo Kastrup, a computer engineer, author, and philosopher. His seems to be the latest and most
popularized version.
According to
some advocates of the mind paradigm, there is no physical universe. What we perceive as physical reality is
entirely the construct of a universal, collective consciousness. We, ourselves, are parts of that collective
consciousness, fragments of it, so to speak, separated from the main body of
consciousness, in the sense that local whirlpools in a body of water might be
considered to be temporary disruptions or turbulences.
At first,
the theory may seem strange, even facetious, to many of us who are steeped in
Western traditions. But the philosophy is
highly detailed, meticulously structured, and vigorously defended by those who
advocate it. Books have been written
about it, including by Kastrup. Engaging
in discussions about it with its believers can be a minefield of semantical
misunderstandings and conceptual confusions.
Their specialized vocabulary seemed to me at first to be psychobabble,
but most of them seem to be educated, reasoning people who deserve more credit
than we normally might assign to the stereotypical “hippie” waxing about being
a butterfly dreaming that he is a human.
One of the
scientific underpinnings of the mind paradigm is quantum mechanics, the very
same branch of science cited by the God paradigm as debunking the physicalist
paradigm. We detailed that in the
preceding chapter.
The logical
basis of the mind paradigm is that we never directly experience anything except
our conscious perceptions and experiences.
Therefore, we can never prove that those perceptions arise from any
other source than consciousness itself.
Thus, one
model of reality presented by the mind paradigm is that only consciousness exists,
and nothing else. All of perceived
reality is reducible to activities within the universal consciousness. Those activities are vibrations, in the field
of collective consciousness.
In the mind
paradigm, we are not considered to be eternal, sovereign individuals, but
rather, temporary partitions of the greater reality. We are not sinners saved by the
self-sacrificing grace of a loving God who created us for eternal fellowship
with him. Advocates of the mind paradigm
may be sympathetic to a generic form of Christianity, but they seem to regard
God more as a symbol than as an absolute reality.
= = = = =
All of the
foregoing is subject to dispute, disagreement, or modification by those with
whom I have engaged in online discussions concerning the mind paradigm. Here are some comments I made (in italics),
and some of the responses online, from one advocate of the mind paradigm. I have edited them for brevity.
--Its proponents often refer to it as, Mind-at-Large Idealism,
abbreviated M@L.
“Cosmic (or Universal) Consciousness" or
"Brahman" or "Absolute Spirit" are more correct terms.
-- In doing so, it (idealism) denies that any of the
physical things leading to our experiences—exist.
They exist. They just do not exist as mindless mind-independent
objects. If we ignore physical reality, we suffer.
-- Eventually, we will all melt back into it (the universal
consciousness).
Opinions differ. Some do not think so.
--Many Eastern sages regard the physical world as an
illusion, at least in the sense that when we see something material, we are not
seeing the object as it really is, but only as a representation of it.
What is "really there" are electrons and quarks. We don’t see those as they are.
--According to the mind paradigm there is no physical
universe.
Yes there is. It just happens to be mind-generated and
mind-dependent.
-- In the mind paradigm, we are not eternal, sovereign
individuals, but rather, temporary partitions of the greater reality.
Some idealists may think we are temporary. I don't.
--[according to idealism] We are not sinners saved by
the self-sacrificing grace of a loving God who created us for eternal fellowship
with him.
I agree with the above sentiments, although not necessarily as
expressed in the Bible.
--Advocates of the mind paradigm may be sympathetic to a
generic form of Christianity, but they seem to regard God more as a symbol than
as an absolute reality.
God is an absolute reality, but not necessarily as in the Bible.
= = = = =
As one can
see from the foregoing, the mind paradigm is difficult for some (including me)
to understand. One might say the same of
Christianity, which has many sects and denominations, some of them in radical
disagreement with each other.
What we can
say, however, is that both the physicalist paradigm and Christianity have had major
impacts on Western civilization. What
impact, if any of significance, the Eastern philosophies will have on the West,
is yet to be fully seen. Over the next
few years, with increased travel and communications, the influence of Eastern
philosophy will either grow or not.
My
inclination is to believe that certain aspects of the physicalist paradigm will
have to be abandoned or modified.
Science itself is challenging it.
But more so, physicalism offers no moral principles. Scientists of course, do have such
principles, but they cannot cite the laws of physics in support of them.
Eastern
mystics have a reputation as being pacifists, gentle and kind people who eschew
violence and practice charity. One would
think that they offer a moral code that will lift us from the increasing barbarism
that has accompanied increased technology.
But as far as we know, Eastern mysticism has arguably made few, if any, practical
contributions to further its pacifist ideals.
On the other hand, one might say that they have not enabled barbarism
either.
But the God
paradigm offers both—a scientific platform from which technology can be enabled
to produce benefits for mankind, and also, a moral code that can save us from
material destruction.
Among the
key factors it employs in doing this is its emphasis on our reliance on divine
influence, even intervention. No human
being has the wisdom, nor the authority, to declare a moral code. Only God can do that, and He does so through
divine revelation. Divinely revealed
truth is the foundation for all of science, and all of society.
Of course,
disputes exist concerning what the Bible says and means. Therefore, anyone who cites the Bible faces
the great difficulty of persuading others.
Only the Holy Spirit can do that.
But not all
is lost. Humans can, when confronted by
historical challenges, call upon God, and receive blessings which enable them,
despite human flaws and sinfulness, to achieve great progress in establishing a
just and enduring society.
Anyone
reading the American Declaration of
Independence must surely be inspired by what some few men of diverse
opinions, even disagreeing on the vital moral issue of slavery, a despicable
institution which some of them supported—even those men crafted a document that
was ahead of its time, and which has inspired countless acts of moral courage
since then.
Much of that
gets lost in the turbulence of history, until today there are many who, lacking
even a fraction of the courage and wisdom of the Founders, condemn them, never
having endured the dangers and hardships that led them to, literally, pledge
their lives, their fortunes (money and property), and their sacred honor (two words
which today often mean nothing), to each other, and to the nation they founded.
How ironic that
is.
Mankind’s
search for truth has never been more urgent than it is now. We have taken into our hands the power to
make of earth a paradise or a hell. We
must choose a path, and soon. Do we have
the wisdom to choose wisely?
-