The Gods of Science and of Speculation — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

Soon after I began attending the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor in 2000, I took Ken Phifer’s “Building Your Own Theology Course.” One product of that class was a talk I gave that Fall that I posted two weeks ago: “Miles Kimball: Leaving Mormonism.” Another product is the document that you see below, entitled “The Gods of Science and Speculation,” dated November 18, 2000.

I believe that the truth is very big---much bigger than any human conception of it. Through the progress of science, I expect the coming centuries to bring astounding revelations about the nature of the Universe, and through the progress of the human spirit, I expect the coming centuries to bring astounding freely chosen visions of the place we will take in the Universe.

Despite the limitations of current knowledge, I want to make meaning out of the best of current science and to speculate about things that might be true given current science.

I take my view of current science from Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Randy Nesse, Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson, Alan Guth, Carl Sagan, John Lewis, Stephen Drury and Julian Barbour, among others---and recently, also from my reading of The Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

While science tells us something about the way things are, our attitude towards those things is up to us. Despite all of its pain and imperfection, I think it is a wonderful Universe. If the Universe is empty and meaningless, I see that as an opportunity for us to freely create our own meanings, individually and collectively.

At some risk of misunderstanding, I will use the word “god” and “gods” freely to talk about certain wondrous aspects of the Universe and to talk about any being who attains a high enough level of intelligence, wisdom and goodness. All of the “gods” I will talk about now are either part of the fabric of the Universe or are located squarely within the Universe.

Traditional Christian theology attempts to unite in one God the Creator, God Who Speaks To Us, and the God of Perfection. I believe these are separate aspects of the Universe. I will call these aspects of the Universe the gods of the past, the gods of the present and the gods of the future.

The gods of the past are the creative principles of the universe. Science has come upon at least three incredibly powerful creative principles. The best documented is evolution---the power of life itself to replicate itself, with inevitable variation and selection of those patterns that replicate best. Carbon-based life on our planet is now in the process of begetting silicon-based life, with likely momentous consequences, for either good or ill. But in the long-run of billions of years, I believe that evolution will inevitably create love, because I believe love is stronger than the absence of love and so will ultimately flourish once it gets a good start. I believe that love of that which is different from oneself is higher than love of that which is identical to oneself. Other-oriented love is hard to come by initially, but it is very strong once it arises.

The second creative principle is the intricacy of quantum mechanics. I believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says that each possible outcome of quantum branching exists. Because of its quantum-mechanical aspect, the Universe has an extraordinary fecundity. The multiplication of different possible worlds, side by side as coexistent, almost-entirely-non-interacting components of the wave function, means it was inevitable that life would arise somewhere in the universe on some branch of the quantum tree. This indeed is the tree of life.

The third creative principle is eternal inflation. In his book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Guth describes the principle of cosmic inflation that he co-discovered. Cosmic inflation helps to explain why the galaxies we can see through our telescopes look so similar in all directions. Inflation allows a patch of space smaller than a pinhead to expand to a sphere billions of light-years across in a fraction of a second. False vacuum is the name of the magical substance that can create more and more of itself from nothing at the speed of dark, then decay into the cauldron of energy that we later see as the start of the Big Bang. Something can come from nothing despite the law of conservation of energy because inside the false vacuum, the pressure of space itself has enough negative energy to balance out the positive energy that is the source of all of the matter and energy we see around us. Eternal inflation is the idea that the false vacuum generates more of itself faster than it decays into ordinary vacuum plus ordinary energy. As a result, the true Universe is an infinite sea of false vacuum with an infinite sprinkling of islands that look like the visible Universe we see in our telescopes, (plus, perhaps other, stranger types of islands). Most of the Universe is invisible, simply because with the false vacuum expanding at the speed of dark, trillions of times faster than the speed of light, there has not been time for light to reach us from more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Universe. Even were it not for the fecundity of quantum branching, the vastness of the Universe created by eternal inflation makes it inevitable that life would arise somewhere.

The god of the present is the god within. When we pray, or meditate, perform rituals, or do good deeds, every once in a while at least, we get in touch with an inner wisdom that is so much greater than our ordinary level of wisdom that many humans down through the millennia have exclaimed that this wisdom must come from a source beyond themselves. For many years, I thought my own spiritual experiences of this type pointed to a God beyond myself who heard and answered prayers. Now, based on my understanding of science, I find it hard to locate the source of my experienced inspiration outside of my own brain and emotional processing systems, but I remain awed by the contrast with my usual level of intellectual and emotional processing. Sometimes I wonder if those experiences of inspiration looked so remarkable not because they were anything remarkable in the context of human experience in general, but only because my normal level of functioning is emotionally stunted in crucial ways. Even if this is so, I feel a great deal of gratitude that I have been able to access that higher level of functioning through prayer, long before that future day when I may have a more straightforward access to that higher level. Looking beyond my own experience, I believe that prayer, meditation, rituals and good deeds are important ways to access our higher selves—the god within. I believe even more firmly that all people should respect the power of spiritual experience as a human fact, even if we cannot agree on where that power comes from. This fact deserves more scientific study as well as respect.

The god of the future is our hopes and dreams and intentions, and the possibilities to which those hopes and dreams and intentions point. We collectively create the future.

For myself, as my part in that collective creation of the future, I choose to be one of those who represent the possibility of all people being joined together in discover and wonder.

Five elements of my picture of all people being joined together in discover and wonder are (1) fun, (2) adventure into the unknown, (3) all people being empowered by tools of understanding, (4) human connection and justice and welfare, and (5) profound relationship. Also, I believe that groups of interacting full-scale human beings, each fulfilling human potential, can be as much more intelligent and greater than an individual human being as the whole brain is more intelligent and greater than an individual neuron. Full freedom and deep community are both necessary for this great thing we cannot fully comprehend to come to pass. Sometimes, when a conversation takes on a life of its own, I think I begin to glimpse what can be.

I have tried to be relatively sober in what I have said so far. Let me now be more speculative. If there is anything that could conceivably be distinct from the Universe that deserves to be called God, it is Consciousness itself. Scientists have no trouble imagining how people could appear to have consciousness when looked at from the outside—this is the “easy problem of consciousness.” The hard problem of consciousness, discussed by Colin McGuinn in his book ``The Mysterious Flame,’’ is how I appear to myself to be conscious, seen from the inside. I like the idea that there is a single Consciousness---one light of Brahman shining through the many windows of individual selves. In his book, The End of Time, Julian Barbour conceives of a timeless Universe of all possible configurations of matter and energy with a mist of quantum probability hovering over it. It is the mist of quantum probability that creates the perception of time. Could this mist of quantum probability be Consciousness itself? It would be consistent with the one light of Brahman shining through the many windows of individual selves. Among other things, this is a story I tell myself to quiet my fears of death.

Is there any room for a personal god outside myself in the Universe? I believe there is such a possibility, though it is not something I have any way of knowing to be true. Having grown up reading science fiction, I thrill to the recent discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. Our galaxy is large enough I think it likely intelligent life has arisen more than once in the Milky Way. If so, we are probably not the first, since our own sun and solar system is only about 5 billion years old, compared with a galaxy that is more than 10 billion years old. Our galaxy is small enough---about 100,000 light-years across, that even at a tenth the speed of light, intelligent aliens from anywhere in our galaxy could reach us in less than a million years. There need be no particular problem of finding us, since the power of replication mentioned above in connection with Evolution makes it easy for aliens to spread throughout the galaxy until they meet some other intelligent race. The fact that they have not destroyed us, and do not seem to have enslaved us, gives us some warrant to hope that they have good intentions toward us. One reason for these good intentions may be the very scarcity of intelligent life. If there are only a few intelligent species arising in each galaxy, each one would seem valuable to another that had been searching for thousands and thousands of years for other intelligent life.

The greatest objection to the idea of intelligent aliens in our galaxy has always been Enrico Fermi’s question ``Where are they?’’---meaning ``If they are there, why don’t we already know about them?’’ To me, the easiest answer to this question is that they are already here but they value our free development so much that are keeping themselves hidden. Traditional monotheistic religions all have reasons to tell why their version of God has not already appeared in the public square, obviating the need for faith. To the extent these reasons make any sense, they work just as well for beneficent intelligent aliens as for the one true God.

Going out on a limb with speculation, in a version of the theodicy, how could beneficent intelligent aliens ethically put up with all of horrors we visit upon each other on this planet and the horrors that come to us from disease and other disasters? First, they may avert some disasters, especially those that would utterly destroy all higher life on our world. They may even go so far as to act to foster freedom, by, say, helping the founders of our own nation in the series of unlikely events that allowed us to separate from England and form a new type of nation. Second, they may compensate for their hands-off policy by using high technology to save our memories and all that makes us individual egos into a cybernetic after-life. This is another story I tell myself sometimes to quiet my fear of death.

I do not know that these beneficent aliens exist. What I do know, is that if they don’t and if we do not destroy ourselves, human beings in some far future have the potential to become that kind of guardian angels toward other intelligent species that we find in this and other galaxies. The hardest part will be learning how to live in harmony with each other for the millions of years on end it will require to reach these others. So at the same time we reach out to establish ourselves throughout the solar system as the first step toward the stars, we must find it in ourselves to be good and just and peaceful. I believe that free religion that is consistent with reason and science, along with art, music, literature and the like, are necessary in the endeavor to raise humanity to the level that it will some day be appropriate in every sense---goodness and wisdom as well as knowledge and power---to call our descendants gods.

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