Most people have spent at least a few minutes pondering a famous riddle, although they may not know that it originated in Zen Buddhism: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Strangely, this turns out to be a pivotal question if you want to prove that God exists, or doesn’t.
I want to explain the whole issue in detail, but if you want to view a vigorous and often contentious debate about God and whether He has a future, ABC Nightline is running Tuesday (March 23). The Nightline episode contains only excerpts, but the full debate will be available online at Nightline/FaceOff/ .
The location was at Cal Tech, where God probably isn’t a pressing topic compared to quantum physics. Yet as it turns out, the two are vitally linked. What you think about reality depends on quantum physics, and since God is the ultimate reality, His existence hinges on such things as waves and particles. This wasn’t a crude argument between believers and non-believers. It was an attempt to see if the most up-to-date science made God’s existence unlikely, which is what atheists led by Richard Dawkins believe.
Taking that position in the debate was Dr. Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptics magazine, and Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation. As staunch materialists, they offered a simple attack on God — nothing is scientifically valid unless it can be seen and measured. Since God has no physical presence in the world, there can be no measurement of His existence. Without a physical presence, the deity is reduced to being subjective. Millions of people were taught to believe in a supreme being. If they paid attention to science, they’d realized that their faith has no real basis.
On the other side, I and my partner, the noted philosopher and writer Jean Houston, rejected materialism. We held that science is about objective data, but human beings have rich internal experiences that are valid. These experiences give rise to art, morality, psychology, and everyday things like love, truth, honor, and so on. Is science really in a position to call human experience itself wrong if it cannot be seen and measured?
Our opponents of course argue that ethics, values, meaning, and purpose are all reducible to brain phenomena. While we hold that brain phenomena are merely representations of consciousness and not the experience itself. Yet it was obvious to me and Jean that God has been greatly undermined by materialist science, and also by organized religion, with its simplistic Sunday school lessons about a bearded patriarch sitting on His throne above the clouds. (The very notion that God is referred to as He implies gender, which a supreme being couldn’t have if such a being is beyond time and space.) No, God can’t have a future until the arguments against Him are discredited, and as it happens, rank materialism has been dismantled by science itself, and in particular by quantum physics.
Here, the discussion gets rather technical, but let’s venture forward on a basic question. Does the moon exist if no one is there to see it? This was the last topic our debate arrived at, and afterwards Dr. Shermer and I continued to discuss it, not as adversaries in a heated debate but in hopes of reaching some kind of understanding or common ground. (Shermer’s summary of our discussion can be found here ) The common sense notion is that of course the moon exists without human beings to look at it. It existed long before life on Earth; it will be around if human folly wipes out our species in some possible future. People aren’t going to be argued out of common sense, no matter how tricky your science or philosophy. Yet, surprisingly, physics starts to fall apart if you cling too stubbornly to common sense.
One of the most famous quips about quantum physics is that it isn’t stranger than you imagine — it’s stranger than you can imagine. This is because quantum physics disposed of raw materialism long ago, showing that solid objects are made up of invisible waves of energy, and those waves themselves disappear into clouds of mere possibilities. Every rock, tree, and cloud is made up of molecules, which in turn are made up of atoms, and they in turn are made up of elementary particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons. It would be consistent with common sense if these particles, and the subatomic particles that they can be broken down into, were solid and stable in spacetime. But they aren’t.
Thanks to two breakthrough ideas — the Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect — nothing in Nature can be seen as solid and fixed in spacetime. The Uncertainty Principle says, in its simplest terms, that you cannot know the position of a particle and its momentum at the same time. The observer effect says that particles are only a superposition of possibility waves until a non-material observer causes them to collapse from one state, a wave, into another, a particle. Already I can see readers glazing over, but these are important points for the existence of God and also for our existence.
All solid objects exist, in essence, as invisible waves that extend infinitely in all directions. When an observer enters the picture, the wave collapses into a point, and that point is a spacetime event — or a particle — that you can measure. So it turns out that looking at a virtual electron (waves) causes it to appear as an actual electron (particle). Is the same true of the moon? Does it appear because consciousness is collapsing possibility waves as the moon?
On the side of materialism, Shermer and many others say no. Quantum behavior, or as Shermer calls it "Quantum weirdness," is confined to the microscopic world. It doesn’t leak into the macroscopic world of rocks, trees, clouds — and the moon. But there are three weaknesses in this argument:
1. Recent discoveries have produced quantum weirdness on the macroscopic level. See this article about "supersizing" quantum mechanics
2. Quantum physics is behind all kinds of technologies used in the big everyday world: transistors, superconductors, experiments with superfluids. There are even cutting-edge experiments with time travel and teleportation, very Star Trek, although so far the results are on the level of light beams, not Scottie and Captain Kirk.
3. Most crucial of all, if you don’t allow quantum phenomenon to interact with the big world, you run into a huge problem with physics itself. Quantum physics is the basis of our macroscopic physical world, so there has to be an interaction, even if that interaction is not fully understood.
Now we are getting somewhere in undermining the certainty that makes materialists too stubborn and certain of themselves. If you don’t admit that the moon is behaving in a quantum fashion, that’s a bit like saying that red blood cells absorb oxygen but the human body as a whole doesn’t. The part and the whole must conform to each other. Having kicked a few rungs out of the materialist position, it’s now possible to see what the alternative may be.
The basic understanding of the collapse of the wave function is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, in which a non-material observer is involved in quantum measurement. John von Neumann demonstrated that an understanding of the collapse of the wave function requires consciousness. Without an observer, there is no collapse, no particle, no matter, no measurement. Alternative quantum theories such as transactional interpretation and many-worlds theory try to get around the need of consciousness or an observer, but fail in the end.
Amazing Article!!!
Conjuring much pondering in one's Mind…..Consciousness
ReMINDers of one of my FAV authors/philosophers/scientists, Christopher Hills…..sure YOU would LOVE his book "Nuclear Evolution"
I DO LOVE where YOU so BEautyFully illustrated Quantum Physics using 'vocabulary' and our physical manifestation thereof whence we have CHOSEn to 'pull the words' out of our 'magical hat' of 'unseen consciousness'.
I must admit, there is a part of ME, albeit completely swayed by the mystery that IS to which YOU speak, a little shall we say, 'put off'………by the FACT that ALL to which is spoken is in TRUTH, conjecture….as much as I DO LOVE Quantum Physics and ALL it has come to show……..that which it DOes show is ALL based upon hypothesis and not just one at that……and not one that is cohesive through and through…….as is the same for any BEliefs or theories regarding god.
I DO BElieve that BOTH Science and Religion are ONE in the Same….as much as they wish to deny ~ there is no escaping the fact that BOTH are seeking to find the SAME end result~ what is LIFE, the meaning of LIFE, the origin of LIFE, the purpose, pathway, conception of Life in and of itSELF……
which leads to the next point…..
as much as may BE revealed through the research, ponderings, discussions etc….at the end of it ALL we still don't KNOW……..for example:
let us presume that what the majority call god is really what is KNOWn as consciousness which by the way, I DO BElieve that a change in the definition, perhaps even label affixed to that which is currently widely KNOWn as god would BE a Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat place to BEgin increasing our understanding and awareness of that which TRUEly IS…….where then did the consciousness come from? what came BEfore the consciousness? how did the consciousness come to BE?
and thus is our quest infinite in its nature, as IS Energy, as are WE
Blessings Sweet Earth Angel Divine
for CHOOSing to BE the MIND, the Consciousness Manifest that YOU ARE and furthermore,
sharing that ONEderFull Pondering BEingness with and for the BEnefit of ALL of WE!
to yOUR HIGHest HAPPYness in Every NOW, ALLways, embraced within the grace of Unconditional LOVE,
Radiate Soul Light
Radiate SELF LOVE
Radiate ONE LOVE
LOVE
Rhonda Sheryl Lipstein
roni
http://www.1isall.com/souls-talking-brain http://www.fulfilleddestiny-s3.com/blog http://www.ustream.tv/user/BEingLOVE
Thanks, Deepak, it appealed to my intellect, mainly, but to my heart as well.
Love
Rouzanna
Absolutely…PERFECT!
God could not have explained itself better in scientific terms…
And I agree that our realization as human beings that experience is rooted in consciousness, that the world has its source in the non-local mind, and that each of us has access to that unconditioned place in our own consciousness… will change the future of our species.
Thank you Deepak, this was a fantastic piece of writing.
Thank you Deepak for this extensive explanation.
You can also put it into one sentence: the merging of the intellect with the intelligence and it is our next evolution. I doubt whether such deep experiences can be explained at all, in any discipline.
The moon is real because I see it in my dreams, and God is real because he sees it with me.
Hi Deepak, you really touched my intellect and heart. Especially the vocabulary example, the paragraph beginning with 'Likewise, consciousness produces visible events from invisible possibilities…..' and the last paragraph did the job best.
Thanks and regards.
Nilotpal
Yes! This is the good stuff! Vintage Dr. Chopra. Nice.
Imagination rules, okay?
Amazing article for the day Deepak. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Love,
constanza
Westerners are familiar with (female) moon goddesses. Our word lunar, as in the lunar cycle of full, crescent, and new moons, comes from the feminine Latin Luna. This seems natural because of the association of the lunar month and the female menstrual cycle, but not all societies envision the moon as a woman.
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