As we think about how Science and its methods work, we realize, as Nicholas Maxwell has stressed repeatedly, that it contains one more implicit assumption. This second assumption is that human minds can figure out the laws of this difficult and confusing place; that is, 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 natural laws out. 

Therefore, I choose to gamble again, this time on the power of human minds, sometimes alone and sometimes in cooperation with other minds, to see through the layers of irrelevant, trivial events and to spot the patterns that underlie their larger movements. Then we can experiment, 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 implement focused, strategic actions that get survival-favouring results. As Science grows, it reduces human misery and pain. 

Again, most 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 which underlie reality is to abandon reason in favor of beliefs founded on something other than observable, replicable, material facts. Once again, we have the evidence of centuries of history to look back on. All the evidence we have about what life was like for the superstitious, cowed tribes of the past suggests that their lives were – as Hobbes puts it – poor, nasty, brutish, and short. People who were willing to think, experiment, and learn made this society that we enjoy today; even the majority of Luddite cynics who claim to despise modernity don’t like to go two days without a shower or a hot bath.

My first point on the road to the theistic view, then, is that these beliefs in, first, the consistency of the laws of the universe and, second, the power of human minds to figure them out, amount to a kind of faith. Yes, faith. Belief in ideas that are so basic that they cannot be proved by some other more basic ideas. For Science, there are no ideas that are more basic than these which say the universe is a single, consistent, coherent system and that we humans do have minds that can figure out how that system works. 

Atheists say these beliefs can’t be called a “faith” at all. They certainly don't lead to a belief in God. They simply enable atheists and theists alike to keep doing Science and to share ideas about their branch of Science with anyone else who is interested. 

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, that means we must 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 leads to real consequences in our behavior, consequences that support the long-term survival of those who live by freedom and love for their neighbors. 

Our ancestors lived by the values implicit in the quantum view of reality centuries before there was ever any scientific research to show us that the universe is founded on probabilities. But we now have a model supported by scientific research, namely the quantum model, to fit together with our long-standing moral code. The parts snap together neatly and precisely.

                                                                       

                        

                                                 Erwin Schrodinger (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

However, quantum theory, once we accept it, 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. Erwin 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 we think distant parts of an entity are in touch with one another (in the case of the universe, instantly), it is entirely reasonable to further postulate that there must be a controller of some kind connecting the stimulus of a spin of one particle to the response of a reverse-spin of another particle in some distant location.

I repeat: 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 that understanding entanglement does move our thinking a bit closer to believing that some sort of a God may exist.

                                                       

                                        

                                Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize–winning physicist (credit: Wikipedia)

But according to science-minded atheists, these ideas about how the universe stays consistent and how it seems to have a kind of awareness, even taken together, only 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 vast 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                                                                                                            (credit: James Posselwhite, via Wikimedia Commons)

In the atheist 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 expanding our knowledge and living in society as responsible adults. Theism, the atheists say, 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 

                                           (credit: Andrea di Bonaiuto, via Wikimedia Commons)

Centuries ago, William of Occam said the best explanation for any phenomenon is the simplest one that will do the job. 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 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 exist in this coherent, 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.