24 September, 2002
Author: George Irbe
Finding the Face of God Through Mundane and Esoteric Science
Gerald L. Schroeder is the author of The Science of God [1], which appeared in 1997. I value this work highly; I have gained much knowledge from it which has helped to solidify my own understanding of God’s immanence in all creation. I have cited many passages from this book in several of my essays. In 2001 Schroeder published a sequel, titled The Hidden Face of God [2]. Naturally, I was interested to read this book to find out what additional thoughts Schroeder can contribute to the understanding of the Creator and his works.
As it states on the back cover of the Touchstone Book edition of his book, Schroeder “first reconciled science and faith as different perspectives on a single whole in The Science of God. Now, in The Hidden Face of God, Schroeder takes a bold step forward, to show that science, properly understood, provides positive reasons for faith.” Indeed, Schroeder is a scientist who endeavors to persuade the ‘faithful’ to embrace not only mundane scientific realities, but also the most far-flung hypotheses of modern cosmology.
I want to comment on the contents of The
Hidden Face of God from these perspectives: (a) observations of intelligent
design in the natural sciences, (b) Schroeder’s religious disposition, (c) the
metaphysical realm of mind or soul,
also known as the ‘mind-body’ problem, and (c) esoteric cosmological theories.
(a) intelligent design in the natural sciences
Comments on this aspect of Schroeder’s work will be deservedly brief, because his presentation of the science of life is so excellent. Gerald Schroeder holds a PhD degree from MIT with expertise in both physics and biology. In The Hidden Face of God he tells a truly captivating tale about the molecular biology of a living cell, the step-by-step making of a human being, how nerve cells work, and the fantastic complexity of the brain. All these marvels are presented along with the evidence that a higher intelligence must be involved in the creation of all the myriad life forms which we know on earth, and in their apparently intelligent interaction with the environment. Schroeder likens the intelligent behavior of living things to their having ‘wisdom’; he says, “The wisdom intrinsic to the simplest forms of life is nowhere presaged in the substrate from which life is built” (p. 91), and, “Had Darwin known of the wisdom hidden within life, I have confidence that he would have proposed a very different theory” (p. 113). Some of Schroeder’s statements about the wonders of life are of memorable quality, for example:
“Wisdom is the fundamental building block of the universe, and it is inherent in all parts. In the processes of life it finds its most complex revelation. Wisdom, information, an idea, is the link between the metaphysical Creator and the physical creation. It is the hidden face of God.” (p. 49), and,
"life has somehow gotten hold of wisdom, of information, that taught it to take energy from its environment, to concentrate that energy, and with it to build and maintain the meaningful complexity of the biological cell.” (p.59), and,
“Basic cell structure is the same throughout the entire biosphere, from the relatively simple structure of a sponge or algal cell to the complexity of a human.” (p. 63), and,
“One basic cell structure, one basic energy source, one set of organelles common to all life. And one system for regulating this unity, the DNA-RNA team that takes individual lifeless raw materials and organizes them into living, thinking, choosing beings. The complexity in the commonness stretches the imagination.” (p. 67)
All this is wonderful, exhilarating stuff for us who believe that the Creator shows his face to us through the intelligent design which is evident in the make-up and functions of all life forms on earth. The Hidden Face of God is, in this respect, an affirmation of, and elaboration on, what was stated in The Science of God.
(b) religious disposition
Gerald L. Schroeder is a scholar of his Jewish faith as well as a devoted scientist. He knows how the ancient Hebrew holy books are to be interpreted and understood. Being an authority on both his science and his Bible has enabled Schroeder to proffer the very convincing arguments in The Science of God and The Hidden Face of God that science and religion, evolution (non-Darwinian) and what is commonly called ‘creationism,’ can be in large measure reconciled, at least to the point where the two stop behaving like mortal enemies and begin to listen to what the other is saying. He is particularly good at reconciling Genesis 1 of the Bible with the currently-prevailing cosmological theory on the formation of the universe.
Like most scientists, and particularly those of the Jewish faith, Schroeder holds his religious convictions in a rational manner, without a trace of the zealotry found in the ardent religious ‘true believer.’ He lets this be known early on in The Hidden Face of God, when he says:
“. . . bizarre claims [have been] erroneously attributed to God through the ages and especially in our age. . . . most of these claims are based on the expectations for the putative (and generally misunderstood) God of the Bible that we learned as children. Obviously, when our child-learned wisdom is evaluated by the sophistication of our adult minds, that wisdom is bound to seem naive.” (p. xii)
However, he also recognizes the legitimacy of the Bible and the wisdom of its scholarly interpreters. Schroeder hopes that science will one day discover the long-sought-for unified theory of forces. He hopes that there is a prophetic clue for that happening in the translation of Genesis by Onkelos:
“We read at the closing of the six days of Genesis, ‘And God saw all that had been done and behold it was very good’ (Gen. 1:31). In the nineteen-hundred-year-old translation of Genesis into Aramaic by the sage Onkelos, the verse is read not as ‘and behold it was very good,’ but as ‘and behold it was a unified order’." (p. 33)
Schroeder is also a man of faith in the conventional biblical sense. He believes that ultimately our fate rests in the hands of God as shown in the following passages:
“. . . the Bible knows that bad things happen to good people and God lets them happen. . . . We are in this universe and that is the way it operates. . . . [there is] the apparent randomness in nature, the acts that bring at times joy and at times tragedy, within the context of the claimed compassion and graciousness of a Creator involved in the creation.” (p. 176)
“. . . the thirteenth-century kabalist Nahmanides asked why is it written "I have known him"? Doesn't God know all persons? Nahmanides answered his own question. God knows all life, but the degree of Divine direction to an individual person depends on that person's individual choice of how close to God he or she wishes to be. A half century earlier, the medieval philosopher Maimonides made the identical observation in his Guide to the Perplexed (Part 3, chapter 51). Only the totally righteous have one-on-one Divine direction, and even that guidance may not ensure a life free of pain and suffering. For the rest of us, chance and accidents do occur. It's our choice as to where we, as individuals, fall within the spectrum of behavior that stretches from intimate Divine direction to total random chance.” (p. 177)
Schroeder’s chief mission in all the books he has written with this theme has been to convince both the scientist and the Bible believer that there is common ground on which the two can and must perforce meet. To this end, he makes his point in several places in The Hidden Face of God:
“. . . at some level there is the metaphysical. . . .Atheist, agnostic, skeptic, and ‘believer’ all share the understanding that some metaphysical non-thing, metaphysical in the sense of being above or outside the physical, must have preceded our universe or have our universe embedded in it. That much is a certainty.” (p. 2), and,
“Revelation and nature are the two aspects of one creation. Theology and science present two versions of that one reality, each version seen from its own unique perspective. The three religions of Jerusalem claim that humankind is created in the image of God, but they give no description of what that image entails. They even insist that God has no perceptible image. . . . How does one imagine, or even relate to, an imageless ‘absolute’?” (p. 21)
Like Einstein, who said: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,” Schroeder similarly makes the argument that each must be supportive of the other:
“. . . the final leap of faith for or against the concept that the metaphysical is active within the physical universe that it created (for both the skeptic and the believer require a leap of faith) is best made from a position of knowledge. Faith backed by knowledge is much stronger than faith based on an emotionally driven gossamer hope, whether the faith be secular or religious.” (p. 93), and,
“The amazing, even startlingly illogical, discoveries in physics and biology during the past few decades have given us the tools to gain scientific insight into the metaphysical underpinnings of our world and, in return, acquire spiritual insight into scientific, empirical fact.” (p. xiii), and finally,
“. . . through nature, of which we are a part, we can discover the immanence of the metaphysical Creator within creation.” (p. 174)
(c) the metaphysical realm
From what Schroeder has and has not stated in his books, I surmise that his metaphysical beliefs do not extend beyond the God of the Hebrew Bible. Belief in an incorporeal and perhaps immortal soul occupies a central place in my own non-religious faith. Schroeder expresses no specific opinion regarding the soul. This is really not surprising. It is a given that a scientist would find it difficult to accept, on faith alone, the existence of an ethereal, indefinable entity called ‘soul.’ Moreover, Schroeder’s Judaic religion is also very ambiguous and rather noncommittal regarding the possibility of a soul having an afterlife. From what I have read, it is my understanding that the idea of an afterlife was introduced into Hebrew religious thought from Zoroastrianism while the Israelites were under Persian rule. Therefore, I can understand Schroeder’s (unstated) unbelief in the soul on both scientific and religious grounds.
I, on the other hand, have an unshakeable belief that all living things have a soul, and
human beings have the most sophisticated souls of all living things. There is
nothing outlandish about this belief. It was also held, some 2400 years ago, by
one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind – Aristotle. His
thoughts on this subject are found in his work, called De Anima [3], Book III, Chapter 4.
I do admire greatly the thought and logic of Aristotle. Thus it was that, having become accustomed to Schroeder’s pleasant style of expressing his ideas, I was shocked by his uncharacteristically intemperate (and to my sensibilities offensive and hurtful) statement regarding Greek philosophy:
“After 2,350 years, modern physics has lifted itself from the erroneous quagmire of materialist Greek philosophy which promulgated the concept that if you can't touch it or see it, it isn't there.” (p. 40)
I find it to be a sublime irony that I believe in an incorporeal soul, the idea for which comes from a Greek philosopher who, according to Schroeder, was not capable of conceiving of something that cannot be touched or seen. It is incomprehensible to me that a physical scientist of Schroeder’s stature can derogate the great thinkers of Western civilization who gave us the very foundation for logic and the scientific method. Could it be that Schroeder is utterly ignorant about Aristotle’s philosophy? Perhaps so, in which case he would not be conscious that in saying, “We all have an unexplainable nebulous desire to reach for some higher purpose, for meaning, in life even after we have satisfied the survival needs of food, clothing, and shelter”( p. 128), he is expressing the very theme of Aristotle’s quest for ‘happiness’.
But to go on, it is clear that Schroeder along with many other scientists, and like the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, avoid straying into the metaphysical realm by defining the puzzling dilemma of ‘the ghost in the machine’ (an euphemism for ‘soul’) as the ‘mind-body problem.’ That Schroeder is also struggling with the ‘mind-body problem’ is clear from the following passages (my remarks are in square brackets):
“Is the mind totally the neurological workings of the brain or is there a brain/mind interface where the physical mingles with the nonphysical? That would make the brain an instrument, a sort of antenna that taps into the consciousness of the universe.” (p. 2) [Note: in which case, the consciousness of the universe being, surely, a metaphysical concept, would make the ‘nonphysical’ mind the equivalent of ‘soul’.]
“. . . there is what appears to be a qualitative transition between the awesome biochemistry by which the brain physically records the incoming data and the consciousness by which we become aware of that stored information. In that passage from brain to mind we may be looking for a physical link that does not exist. Could the consciousness we perceive as the mind be as fundamental as . . . gravity . . . or the electrical charge generated by a proton? Gravity and charge are emergent properties.” (p. 6) [Note: the concept of ‘emergent property’ is as ethereal as the concept of ‘soul’; thus, indeed, the concept of mind/soul is as fundamental as gravity.]
“The mind is our link to the unity that pervades all existence. Though we need our brain to access our mind, neither a single synapse nor the entire brain contains a hint of the mind. And yet the consciousness of the mind is what makes us aware that we are humans; that I am I and you are you. The most constant aspect of our lives is that we are aware of being ourselves.” (p. 147) [Note: the ‘consciousness of the mind’ is the ‘soul.]
Scientists may someday prove that the mind is totally a flesh-and-blood, physical phenomenon, or, quite possibly, they will find it emergent, not defined by the physical.” (p. 148) [Note: in other words, they may possibly concede the presence of the incorporeal soul.]
“We have a missing link right in our heads at the brain/mind connection. The move from brain to mind is not one of quantity - a few more neurons and we'll tie the sensation to the awareness of it. It's a qualitative transition, a change in type. The mind is neither data crunching nor emotional response. Those are brain functions. Mind functions are self-experience, seeing, hearing, smelling.” (p. 157) [Note: there is no missing link; there is the soul which expresses itself by using the brain.]
In the following passage Schroeder comes as close to saying the word ‘soul’ as one can without actually doing so:
“The brain has space for two versions of you: the you you never meet but that meets with you every moment of your life as it regulates all the automatic functions of your body; and the you you know so well, the one that feels as if it is just above the bridge of your nose within your forehead.” (p. 126)
And in the next two passages Schroeder concedes the presence of certain mental properties in other animal species:
“While all vertebrates have the emotion-packed limbic system, only mammals have a highly developed cerebral cortex, the site of advanced logic and data processing.” (p. 117), and,
“The limbic system, and hence all vertebrates, including reptiles, birds, and fish, store emotional information as long-term memory. And against this stored information, incoming data are analyzed. Memory is not the province of mammals alone. All vertebrates house within their brains some aspects of their personal histories.” (p. 118)
I maintain that these properties actually belong to the souls of the living creatures. Aristotle may have come up with a rather incredible classification of souls and their properties for the different living things, but, as is true with so much of our knowledge, he did spark the right idea.
It is useful to mention here how the philosopher Karl Popper and the neurologist John Eccles dealt with the ‘mind-body problem’ in their jointly authored work, The Self and Its Brain [4]. Popper says, in Chapter P4, section 29 : “. . . I wish to state clearly and unambiguously that I am convinced that selves exist,” but later, in the same Chapter, section 42, he says, “. . . there seems to be no reason to believe in an immortal soul, or in a psychical substance that can exist independently of the body.” One must conclude that for Popper the ‘self’ exists only so long as the brain exists. Schroeder would in all probability subscribe to the same notion.
John Eccles allows for more metaphysical latitude to the ‘mind-body problem.’ He says, in Dialogue XI,“ . . . just as I can’t give a scientific account of my personal origin – I woke up in life as it were to find myself existing as an embodied self with this body and brain – so I cannot believe that this wonderful gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions. . . . This self-conscious mind of ours has this mysterious relationship with the brain and . . . achieves experiences of human love and friendship, of the wonderful natural beauties, and of . . . intellectual excitement and joy . . . Is this present life all to finish in death or can we have hope that there will be further meaning to be discovered? . . . I think there is complete oblivion about the future, but we come from oblivion. Is it that this life of ours is simply an episode of consciousness between two oblivions, or is there some further transcendent experience of which we know nothing? . . . there may be some central core, the inmost self, that survives the death of the brain to achieve some other existence which is quite beyond anything we can imagine.”
From John Eccles I inherited that most meaningful of questions: Is it that this life of ours is simply an episode of consciousness between two oblivions, or is there some further transcendent experience of which we know nothing? My answer is that, considering that the Creator does everything for a purpose, there would be none in creating a conscious entity between two oblivions.
(d) the irrational exuberance of theoretical cosmology
After reading The Hidden Face of God, I had to take exception with the statement on the back cover of the book that ‘ Schroeder takes a bold step forward, to show that science, properly understood, provides positive reasons for faith.’ In my opinion, not all of the science presented by Schroeder provides positive reasons for faith. Not all of Schroeder’s scientific theories are amenable to reconciliation with metaphysical faith or beliefs. It appears to me that, in the main, the modern-day cosmological theories, espoused rather ardently by Schroeder, are antithetical to common sense, and even more so to metaphysical beliefs.
I will not argue with that part of theoretical cosmology presented by Schroeder which talks about the big bang, or the spontaneous ‘expansion’ of the universe, or which says that “. . . we are made of the stuff of the big bang. We were present at the creation” (p. 180); or that “Fifteen billion years ago all of us and all we see were part of a compact homogeneous ball of energy” (p. 184). This part of theoretical cosmology, which I characterize as irrationally exuberant, does not intrude on the reality of our every-day existence and is therefore hardly worth the bother of a dispute.
However, there are other aspects of modern theoretical science, which I characterize as ‘esoteric,’ which tend to paralyze our ordinary common understanding of reality and promote a nihilistic vision of all existence. Here are a few selections from The Hidden Face of God to show what I mean by that:
“. . . the solid world is really 99.9999999999999 percent empty space made solid by hypothetical, force-carrying, mass-less particles . . . [a]nd . . . even that minuscule fraction of matter that is matter may not actually be matter, but wavelets of energy that we material beings sense as matter.” (p. 40)
“The world we see as solid is made solid not by matter, but by ethereal forces carried in photons (themselves a theoretical construct) traveling immense distances between the nuclei and surrounding electron clouds. . . . The world of atoms and molecules consists of wavelike particles separated from each other by voids, held in place by never-seen, mass-less photons, traveling at the speed of light among particles that are not only particles but also waves.” (p. 30)
“. . . quantum physics . . . prove to us that there is no reality. Not even the one part in a million billion that seemed to be solid. . . . That all existence may be the expression of information, an idea, a quantum wave function, is not fantasy and it is not some flaky idea. It's mainstream science. . . . There is the growing possibility that for all existence, we humans included, there's nothing, nothing as in "no thing," there. . . . the world is more a thought than a thing, more intangible than real.” (p. 4)
“Fighting it all the way, we are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into accepting the truth that our material existence is more fiction than fact. I say it. I teach it. The logic of my frontal cortical lobes analyzes the data and believes it. But in my limbic emotions, I fight it all the way. I want nature to be natural, natural by human, physical standards, and it doesn't seem to be turning out that way after all.” (p. 171)
Call me a Neanderthal, but you will never get me to accept as truth that our material existence is more fiction than fact. What Schroeder and I in actuality disagree on so strongly is our differing views of reality. I find the concepts of Karl Popper to be intellectually quite congenial with my own. So I turn to Popper for help in order to counter Gerald Schroeder’s paradigm of reality.
In The Self and Its Brain [4], in Chapter 1, Section 4, Popper explains how he views the term “real.” He suggests that if an entity is regarded as real through a process of theoretical derivation, it is better to talk of the truth or verisimilitude of the theory rather than of the existence of the entity. Today we accept atoms, electrons and other elementary particles as really existing because of their causal effects on photographic emulsions; the photographic emulsion is an ‘ordinary real material thing.’ Thus we conclude logically that “real” entities can be concrete or abstract in various degrees. We accept the forces and fields of force postulated by physics as real because they appear to act upon material things. Still, these postulated forces are more abstract and conjectural than ordinary material things. According to Popper, “they are dispositions to interact . . . highly abstract theoretical entities; yet as they interact in a direct or indirect way with ordinary material things, we accept them as real.”
There is an item that made news recently in science which illustrates this argument beautifully: The reason that the little lizards called geckos can walk on smooth surfaces even upside down is because a gecko has about 500,000 hairs, called setae, each about one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, on the bottom of each foot. Furthermore, the tip of each of the setae is further divided into between several hundred and 1,000 even tinier hairs called spatulae (visible only through the electron microscope). The lizards defy gravity by using what is called the "van der Waals force." This force causes molecules to cling together, like magnets. However, it is a weak force that works only at extremely small distances. For example, when the gecko plants his hairy little toe on the surface of a mirror, the extremely fine toe hair (spatulae) get close enough to the molecules of the mirror to establish a van der Waals force attraction. In fact, the contact between the hairs and the molecules of the mirror becomes so intimate that, for a split second, the hairs are actually "part of" the mirror.
Now, as far as the gecko is concerned, he is real, the mirror is real, his marvelously engineered foot is real, the molecular force he utilizes is real, and so is the fly he has just now snagged with his tongue. And I can intellectually grasp and accept all of the gecko’s realities as well.
I am satisfied, like Popper, to accept that material things, i.e. solid material bodies, are real in the traditional sense, and likewise accept with the physicists that theoretical physical entities other than matter, such as forces, fields of force, electrical charges, photons, etc., are real. However, there is a reason why we differentiate between these two kinds of realities – the concrete and the abstract.
In Chapter 2, titled “The Worlds 1, 2, and 3,” Popper presents a tripartite model of our existence. He calls World 1 the universe of the physical entities; World 2 is the world of our mental states, including states of consciousness and psychological dispositions and unconscious states; there is also a World 3 which is the world of contents of thought and the products of the human mind. Products of the human mind include stories, explanatory myths, tools, scientific theories (true as well as false), scientific problems, social institutions, and works of art.
Many World 3 objects can only be expressed in conjunction with material objects, and thus belong to both World 3 and World 1. These include sculptures, paintings, books, and many other instances where World 3 objects consisting of words, images, or music are expressed on a material medium belonging in World 1. It is important to note that, first and foremost, World 3 objects are even more abstract than physical forces, but they are none the less real; for one, they are powerful tools for understanding and changing World 1. But World 3 objects have an effect on World 1 only through their implementation and application by their human creators who, in their turn, must use their World 2 mental processes to do so. We can therefore conclude that both World 3 objects and the processes of World 2 are in a sense also real, although their reality is unlike the traditional concepts of material reality.
I would like to conclude this commentary on The Hidden Face of God by stating what, at least to me, are some obvious truths, not all of which have been enunciated by the author, Gerald Schroeder:
- the esoteric scientific theories which are a part of this discussion are our World 3 products and thus have only an abstract reality;
- the basic material from which everything in our universe was made was exnihilated by the Creator;
- everything that was created from this basic material was done with intelligent design and with a purpose in mind;
- the stuff that we are made of was present at the big
bang but we surely were not, and ‘being there’ is the only thing that counts;
everything, including us humans, has been and is still being created from the
basic stuff according to what the Creator intends it to be; it is stupid and
serves no useful purpose to reduce, by theoretical means, the meaning and
essence of all of his creations back to the basic materials from which they are
built. That is not to deny the truth of what the basic stuff is, according to
science, but only to say that we are more than that stuff, just like a piece of
good furniture is more than the wood it is made from.
References
[1]The Science of God; Gerald L. Schroeder (1997); Free Press.
[2]The Hidden Face of God; Gerald L. Schroeder (2001); Touchstone.
[3]De Anima; Aristotle.
[4]The Self and Its Brain; Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles (1977); Routledge.
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