Chapter 16.                   Part C 

It is also worth noting here that as we think about how Science and its methods work, we realize, as Nicholas Maxwell has stressed many times, that it contains one more implicit assumption. This second implicit assumption is that human minds can figure out the laws of this difficult and confusing place, i.e. that we're not kidding ourselves about how smart we are. But all the evidence of the history of Science, and of humanity more generally, suggests that we can figure those laws out. We're pretty smart. Therefore, I choose to gamble again, this time on the power of human minds, sometimes alone, sometimes in cooperation with other human minds, to see through the layers of irrelevant, trivial events and to spot the patterns that underlie their larger movements. Then we can test and revise and gradually arrive at models and natural law statements that really do explain the world, and so we gradually come to master the knowledge that empowers us to design – and engage in – focused, strategic actions that get survival-favoring results.

Again, the majority of the citizens of the West see this choice-gamble as the only rational one to take. The alternative to believing in the power of human minds, individually or in cooperating groups, to figure out the laws that underlie reality is to abandon reason in favor of beliefs founded on something other than observable, replicable, material facts. To trust old books and theocrats. But once again, we have the evidence of centuries of human history to look back on. All of the evidence that we have about what life was like for the superstitious, cowed tribes of the past suggests that their lives were – as Hobbes puts it – nasty, brutish, and short. People who were willing to think, analyze, experiment, and learn made this society that we enjoy; even the vast majority of Luddite cynics who claim to despise modernity won’t go two days without a shower.  

My first main point or conscious realization on the road to the theistic view, then, is that these beliefs in the consistency of the laws of the universe and in the power of the human mind to figure them out, when added together, amount to a kind of faith. To atheists and skeptics, this very belief system, they feel, can't properly be called a "faith" at all. It certainly doesn’t lead them to a belief in God. It simply enables scientists, skeptic and theistic alike, to keep doing Science and to share ideas about Science with anyone else who is interested. More than that, atheists say, it does not entail.

But, now let's add some other powerful ideas. If we truly believe in Science, then we are committed to trying to integrate into our thinking all well-supported theories in any of the branches of Science. In this twenty-first century, what that means is that we must now try to integrate uncertainty, quantum and non-quantum, into our worldview. Earlier we saw that extrapolating from the quantum model led us to conclude that the values that we call "freedom" and "love" are real, i.e. that our believing in these values and living under the worldview that they entail, leads to survival-oriented, real-world consequences.

              

                                     

                                                                                  Erwin Schrodinger

            However, quantum theory, once it's accepted, also comes with some other startling corollaries and experimental findings attached. Quantum entanglement implies that the universe feels itself, all over, all at once. The universe is not, as pre-quantum science pictured it, cool, local, and aloof. It is capable of what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance", and in fact, it functions that way all of the time. (5.) Our best twenty-first century model of the universe is telling us that all of the parts of the universe are in touch, instantly, with all of the other parts, all of the time. Schrodinger put it this way: "There seems to be no way of stopping [entanglement] until the whole universe is part of a stupendous entanglement state." (6.)

            If distant parts of an entity are in touch with each other - in the case of the physical universe, instantly - then, it is entirely reasonable to postulate that there must be a controller of some kind connecting the "stimulus", of a spin reversal of one particle and the "response", of another particle in some distant location reversing its spin, by postulating a controller of some kind in between.   

            This way of seeing the universe as being a kind of aware is my second big idea. It is well known to scientistic atheists. It is a way that they admit is getting a tiny bit closer to saying that there is a possibility of a sort of a God.  

      

                

                                                                              Murray Gell-Mann

But, according to the science-minded atheists, all of these ideas about how the universe stays consistent and how it seems to be a kind of aware, even taken together, add up to a "trivial" belief. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann went so far as to derisively call this whole way of thinking "quantum flapdoodle". (7.)  

               

            In other words, we may have deep feelings of wonder when we see how huge and amazing the universe really is – far more amazing, by the way, than any science or religion of past societies made it seem. We may even have intuitions that tell us that in order for information to go instantaneously from one particle in one part of the universe to another particle in another vastly separated part suggest, there must be a controlling consciousness of some kind joining the two. But these feelings, the atheists say, don't change anything. The God that theists describe and claim to believe in - even if, under the scientistic worldview we agree to accept that the concept might be worth discussing - by all of the evidence, doesn't answer prayer, doesn't give us some other existence after we die, doesn't do miracles, and doesn't “care” one way or the other about us or how we behave.