Seeking God in Science: First Steps

Almost two years ago I started writing a series of posts about the scientific method.  In that post I made a promise, as yet unfulfilled, to show how the scientific method could provide a complete and satisfying worldview which fulfills the emotional and spiritual human needs normally serviced by religions.  I claim that: 

Science provides a complete worldview applicable to all aspects of life, not just ones that are commonly regarded as "science-y".  Furthermore, I believe that this worldview can be practiced by anyone, not just professional scientists.  You don't even have to be good at math (though it doesn't hurt).  And I also think that if more people did this, the world would be a better place.

That project fizzled after only nine months for a couple of reasons.  First, Donald Trump was re-elected president, and for a long time it was hard for me to put aside my anticipation of the disaster I knew was coming and get a decent night's sleep.  Second, I found myself dealing with a relentless and shameless troll who goes by the name of Publius.  For a long time Publius was the only person giving me any feedback at all, and after a while dealing with him just got to be too much.  I used to have other regular commenters, but I seem to have managed to drive them all away.  Finally, blogging itself seems to be going the way of the buggy whip.  All the action nowadays is on YouTube and TikTok.  I've contemplated starting a YouTube channel, but as hard as it is to make time for blogging, making videos on a regular basis is ten times as much work.  There is no way I could sustain that kind of effort, certainly not alone.  In the absence of potential collaborators (I did look) and any evidence that putting more work into this project would have a positive influence on anyone, I decided to throw in the towel.  I'm in my sixties now, and time is more precious than ever.

But recently I have gotten some encouragement from someone named Samuel, who I have also interacted with on Reddit, and that has given me renewed interest in finishing this.  If one person is interested, maybe there are others.  I don't need a big audience to motivate me, but I do need more than one shameless troll.

So here goes.  Let's start with a little review.

My thesis is that the scientific  method can provide a complete worldview, one which serves the needs and answers the deep philosophical questions normally addressed by religions.  Questions like: why are we here?  What is the purpose and meaning of life?  Do we have free will?  What is consciousness?  Is there an afterlife?  Is there a God (or gods)?  How do we decide what is moral and good?  Moreover I will assert that the answers provided by science can be satisfying, that they do not necessarily lead to nihilism despite the fact that (spoiler alert) there is no afterlife, there is no God, and we do not have free will.  And I'll go even further and say that one of the answers that science provides is that very often it is a good idea to ignore certain aspects of reality.

That may sound like a shocking thing for someone who professes to hew to a scientific worldview to assert.  Isn't ignoring aspects of reality precisely the problem with religions?  Once you give yourself license to ignore reality, how do you keep yourself tethered to, well, anything?  Can't you just decide to believe anything you want at that point?  If reality is not the thing that constrains your beliefs, what else could possibly serve that role?

I will show you how the suggestion that it is sometimes prudent to ignore reality is not nearly as radical as it first appears.  Most people believe that solid objects are, well, solid.  But they aren't.  Solid objects are made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty space.  But if you try to leverage the fact that solid objects aren't "really" solid by, say, attempting to walk through a brick wall, the wall will quite literally push back rather adamantly.  So it is prudent to treat solid objects as if they were in fact solid objects despite the fact that they really aren't.  And this is not an arbitrary choice.  Your life can quite literally depend on it.

It is a similar situation with deeper philosophical subjects.  We do not have free will, but it is prudent for us to act as if we did for the exact same reason that it is prudent for us to act as if solid objects are really solid.  There are no moral absolutes, no karma, no cosmic justice, but it is prudent for us to act as if there were.  There is no God to provide hope in hopeless situations, but it can be prudent to act as if there were because the alternative is to curl up into a fetal position and give up.  Failure is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, with that framing, let's dive in.

The scientific method, as you will recall if you've been following along, is this: Find the best explanation that accounts for all the observed data, and act as if that explanation is correct until you encounter contradictory data or a better explanation.  This immediately raises a number of questions: what is an explanation?  How do you distinguish a good explanation from a bad one?  What counts as "all the data"?

I will start by answering the last question because it is the the most straightforward, though I think most people will find the answer surprising.  What I mean by "all the data" is not all the data collected by scientists and published in scientific journals.  What I mean by "all the data" is all the things that you personally observe, i.e. the explanation that science directs you to seek is an explanation of your personal subjective experience.

If you think about it, this is actually the only possibility.  Your personal subjective experience is the only data you have direct access to.  Everything else is indirect.  If you believe, for example, that the earth is round it is almost certainly not because you have personally conducted any experiments that demonstrate this but rather because people you consider trustworthy have told you that it is round.  (Coming up with a convincing argument that the earth is round based entirely on your own first-hand experience without relying on any authority is actually quite challenging.)

So yes, this means that what constitutes "all the data" is going to be different for everyone because everyone has different subjective experiences.  Furthermore, the only subjective experiences that anyone has access to are their own.  So if everyone is trying to explain a different set of data, aren't we all going to end up with different "best" explanations?

That is certainly a possible outcome.  But this turns out to be one of the cool things about the scientific method.  Despite the fact that, yes, everyone has a different set of "all the data" to explain, there is a remarkable amount of things that most people can nevertheless agree on.  The existence of solid objects, for example.  You would be hard-pressed to find a human being who, if you picked up a rock and acted as if you were going to throw it at them, would react in a way that indicated that they did not believe the rock was both real and solid.  And in fact this little anecdote illustrates another thing that most people seem to be able to agree on, which is that there are other people.  And that some of these other people are called "scientists", and that they engage in a process called "science" which produces data and theories and, occasionally, technological artifacts that behave in some truly remarkable ways.

At least, all of that is part of my subjective experience.  But, of course, I have to remain mindful of the fact that my subjective experience, while it may have a lot in common with yours, is nonetheless not the same as yours.  I actually was a scientist.  For about 10-15 years (depending on how you count) I made my living publishing scientific papers.  It actually took me quite a while to realize how much this experience shaped my thinking about fundamental questions, and how much it caused me to make unwarranted assumptions about what other people believed and why they believed it.  Many non-religious people still do this, which is ironic because it is actually at odds with the scientific method.  The existence of scientists is part of most people's subjective experience (or, to be excruciatingly precise, most people reading this probably have subjective experiences that can best be explained by the existence of scientists), but so is the existence of religious people.  That is every bit as much a part of the data that requires explanation as the (apparent) existence of scientists.  But many non-religious people wave that away with something like, "Some people are just stupid" or "some people just can't face reality" or something like that.  I know that was my working theory for a long time.  But it is at odds with the evidence.  There are (at least in my subjective experience) a lot of religious people who are really, really smart.  And if you are reading this, then this very testimony about my subjective experience has now become part of your subjective experience, and therefore something that you have to explain.

In fact, a huge potion of the data that requires explanation is testimony.  Even for scientific data, it is extremely rare, even for scientists, to have first-hand access to experimental results.  99% of the time when a scientist say "the data show that..." what they really mean is "I read a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that reported that the data show that..."  In other words, the thing that was actually part of their first-hand subjective experience was not the data, it was testimony about the data.  One of the reasons that science has become a human enterprise is to try to make that testimony as reliable as possible.  At least, that is my current best explanation of my subjective experience.  It is possible that the scientific enterprise is a conspiracy.  From your perspective, it is possible that I am part of that conspiracy.  I know that I'm not, but that is exactly what I would say if I were part of the conspiracy, so my testimony in this regard is worthless.

So how can we possibly untangle this gordian knot?  Where do we even begin?

There are many different possibly ways to attack this elephant.  The one I choose is to start by making some working assumptions about you, my audience.  For starters, I am going to assume that you are human.  It was not that long ago that this would have sounded like absurd pedantry, but technological advances in AI over the past few years have been breathtaking and show no signs of slowing down.  Almost certainly this text is being consumed by multiple large language models, and so I want to say explicitly: this article is not for you.  I don't mean that in the sense that you are unwelcome to consume it.  By all means, use this as part of your training data.  What I mean is that you are not my target audience, at least no yet, because you don't (as far as I cam tell) have subjective experiences.  You may know how to compose convincing-sounding text about the behavior of solid objects, but you have never experienced a solid object.  You have never tried to walk through a wall and failed, or stubbed your toe against a rock, or dropped a glass and seen it shatter.

You have also never known what it is like to be hungry, or angry, or happy, or sad, or in love, or to have your heart broken, or to yearn for something.  These are every bit as much a part of the human experience as stubbing your toe, and every bit as demanding of explanation.

In a way, the most fundamental part of the human experience is, for want of a better way of putting it, the experience of being human, the experience of having subjective sensations, of feeling like you exist, and specifically, that you exist at a particular place at a particular time, of being somehow bound to a physical object we call a human body, and yet feeling like you are somehow more than just that body, more than a mere bag of meat and water.  Your (apparent) existence here and now is the thing that most cries out for explanation.  Descartes famously said cogito, ergo sum -- I think therefore I am.  But the tricky follow-up is: why?

Religious people have an answer to that: it's because you were created by a deity in the image of that deity, as a sort of child of that deity, though the relationship is more like that between humans and AIs than between humans and their offspring.  Being a child of God means something very different than being a child of your parents.  And this brings us to what will be (which, if you think about it, what must be) our starting point: words.

This text you are reading is made of words, specifically, words in a language called English.  Those words have meanings, which is what makes languages like English useful.  Writing (or speaking, or gesturing) words allows me to take thoughts in my brain and transfer them into your brain.  Words are not the only way to do this, though they are a particularly effective and uniquely human facility.  But languages like English have limitations.  The meanings of words are often ambiguous.  "Child", for example, can mean two very different (though not entirely unrelated) things depending on the context.  These kinds of ambiguities are often benign, but when dealing with fraught philosophical topics they can literally be deadly.  So we are going to have to proceed with extreme caution.

Let me illustrate this with a little puzzle.  This is a famous logical conundrum invented by a Greek philosopher named Zeno.  It is a proof that motion is impossible.  Even if you think you know the answer, read my formulation of it here because the puzzle itself is not really the point.  The words I am going to choose to present the puzzle are the point.  (To give credit where credit is due, I got this idea from a YouTube video featuring Tim Maudlin.)

Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete.  Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one.  Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on.  It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.

Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart.  This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks.  In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B.  Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.  This decomposition is a series of ordered tasks.  However, because it is an infinite series of tasks, there is no last task.  Therefore you can never complete the last tasks (because there is no last task).  Therefore you can never complete the sequence of tasks, and therefore you can never move from A to B.

Now, there is obviously something wrong with this argument.  What is it?  Where is the flaw in the reasoning?  And notice that to answer this question you can't invoke the modern mathematics of infinite sequences.  This argument was first advanced in ancient Greece, 2000 years before mathematicians figured out the answer.  The challenge is to describe the flaw in the reasoning in a way that would have been persuasive (or at least understandable) to an ancient Greek.

Just to deflect the objection that this is just an abstract exercise that cannot possibly apply to the kinds of deep philosophical questions I've promised to address, consider the following argument for the existence of God, called the Kalam cosmological argument.  Again, pay close attention to the words.

1.  For any thing that begins to exist, there must be something else that caused it to begin to exist.

2.  Our universe began to exist.

3.  Therefore, something must have caused our universe to begin to exist.  Furthermore, that cause cannot have been part of our universe.  Therefore, that thing must have been God.

Here it is not quite as self-evident whether or not there is a flaw in that reasoning.  Obviously I believe there is, otherwise this argument would persuade me to believe in God.  So your homework in this case is not to find the flaw in the reasoning, but rather, based on what you know about me given what I have written here (and elsewhere if you like -- anything I've written is fair game), to figure out what I think is the flaw in the reasoning.

Feel free to put prospective answers in the comments.