Chapter 17.                                      (continued) 

But now let’s add some other powerful ideas.

If we truly believe in science, then we are committed to integrating into our thinking all well-supported theories in any of the branches of science. In the twenty-first century, what that means is that we must now try to integrate uncertainty, quantum and non-quantum, into our world view. Earlier we saw that extrapolating from the quantum model led us to conclude that the values we call freedom and love are real, that is, that our believing in these values and living under their worldview leads to survival-oriented, real-world, positive consequences.

                        

                                                                                 Erwin Schrodinger

However, quantum theory, once it’s accepted, also comes with some other startling corollaries and experimental findings. 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 the time.⁵ Our best twenty-first century model of the universe is telling us that all the parts of the universe are in touch, instantly, with all the other parts, all 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 one another (in the case of the physical universe, instantly), it is entirely reasonable to postulate that there must be a controller of some kind connecting the stimulus of a spin of one particle and the reverse-spin response of another particle in some distant location.

This way of seeing the universe as having a kind of awareness is my second big idea. It is well known to scientists, theist and atheist alike. They admit it is a way to move a bit closer to saying that a possibility exists of a sort of a God.

                                         

                                                     Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize–winning physicist

But according to the science-minded atheists, all these ideas about how the universe stays consistent and how it seems to have a kind of awareness, even taken together, add up to little more than 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 is—far more amazing, by the way, than any religion of past societies made it seem. Our intuition may even suggest that for information to go instantaneously from one particle in one part of the universe to another particle in another vastly separated part, a controlling consciousness of some kind must be joining the two. But these feelings, the atheists say, don’t change anything. The God that theists describe and claim to believe in, according to all the evidence, doesn’t answer prayer, doesn’t give us some other existence after we die, doesn’t perform miracles, and doesn’t care a hoot about us or how we behave.

                                                                   

                                     

                                                                        Pierre-Simon de Laplace

In the atheistic scientistic view, believing in such a God is simply excess baggage. It is a belief that we might enjoy clinging to as children, but it is extra, unjustified weight that only encumbers the active thinking and living we need to practice to keep increasing our knowledge and living in society as responsible adults. Theism, atheists say, pointlessly hobbles both science and common sense. Or as Laplace famously told Napoleon, “Monsieur, I have no need of that hypothesis.”

   

                                          William of Occam, English philosopher and theologian

Centuries earlier, William of Occam said the explanation that best suffices for any phenomenon is the simplest one. Newton reiterated the point: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”⁸ The method of science tells us that if we can explain a phenomenon by using two basic concepts instead of three or four, the two-pronged tool should be the one we choose.

According to atheists, belief in God—or at least in a God that might or might not permeate this consistent, entangled, self-aware, material universe—is a piece of unneeded, dead weight. In our time, under the worldview of modern science, the idea has no content. It can and should be dropped. Or as the sternest atheists put it, it is time that humanity grew up.