From here to Divinity

Open Minds: Both scientists and theologians need a new way of understanding God, argues Tim Lott.

As soon as I lost my faith in God at around the age of 14, I started looking for something to fill the God-shaped hole. Just a few years later I discovered the spiritual possibilities of science after stumbling on a remarkable book called An Index of Possibilities. Eschewing equations and textbook pedantry in favour of cartoons, humour and wild graphics, the book explained in layman’s terms the remarkable philosophical and theological implications of relativity, quantum theory, gravity and other science fundamentals.

Index suggested that what I had thought a tiresome academic discipline could actually stimulate the imagination rather than murder it. Over the decades that followed, I joined in the growing public fascination with popular science, and it occurred to me eventually that the real question was not “Is there a God?”, but “What does science tell us about the modern meaning of the idea that the word ‘God’ points towards?”

For there can be as much narrow-mindedness in scientific circles as there is in religious circles. Many scientists are not only reluctant to acknowledge that there might be valid forms of knowledge outside the scientific method but blind to the godlike implications of what modern science has revealed to us. Perhaps because new-age “magical thinkers” have misinterpreted much of the evidence to come up with spurious and irrational conclusions. However, the new-agers are right about one thing. The universe is profoundly weird, and even godlike. The Big Bang itself, entirely inaccessible to the tools of scientists, is an extraordinarily theological phenomenon — a whole creation emerging out of nothing in an instant. And why should there be anything at all, rather than nothing, for ever? It would be much less trouble to have no events, no stuff. Yet here we are, millions of years on, evolved from that formless energy into you reading and me writing. Why? Science is silent.

The queerness of the universe goes much further than this. For instance, it isn’t really there in the sense of which we think of it. The amount of actual “stuff” in the human body, for example, can be contained in a grain of salt — the atoms and molecules that we are made of consist almost entirely of space. Of course, we feel solid, but at the most fundamental level there’s almost nothing there. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Furthermore, at a subatomic, quantum level, matter springs in and out of existence in a kind of “quantum froth”. Something all the time is coming from nothing then reverting to nothing again. And it is scientifically unquestionable that the mighty cosmos, from one distant corner to another, including the particles that make up you and me, is all made of the same stuff/energy — the same stuff/energy, down to the last infinitesimally small particle, created all those millions of years ago in the Big Bang. Not a single iota has been destroyed or created since. We are, literally and factually, both all one and eternal.

Since all is one, the universe is you — or at least expressed through you. The universe is dead without human beings to conjure it into life — to give it colour, meaning, shape. In that sense, we are still at the centre of the universe. Science, in its constant breaking down and measuring, obscures the truth that there are not multitudes of events — just one event. Not many things — just one thing. And that event, that thing, could be described as the unfolding of “God”. It’s a God that has nothing to say about morality, or judgment, or heaven. But it is unquestionably real — and it is evidenced in our ability to imagine and perceive. We are the universe become conscious of itself.

These are all extraordinarily godlike ideas, and yet as factual, as “real”, as the dinner you eat or the road you walk upon. The trouble is that science gives us no way to feel these miracles as lived realities. The human soul is left unnourished by equations and syllogisms. Science needs a dose of humility before it can start working out what a scientific God might look like — and feel like. Science hates God because it shows that scientific powers are limited in the face of an ultimately unfathomable universe. But scientists need to take note of the Zen nostrum, “If you ask where the flowers come from, not even the god of spring knows.” Or, as Sir Arthur Eddington put it when talking about fundamental particles, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”

Science respects ignorance and “the cloud of unknowing” in a way that religion based on sacred scriptures often does not. But we shall not move towards a new vision of God until science acknowledges the limits of its own disciplines and makes the poetic leap from measurement and analysis to meaning and synthesis. This is perhaps a job more for poets than scientists. If so, poets need to read science books more — and scientists need to understand what poetry is for and the irrefutable realities of which it, too, speaks.

Article by Tim Lott published in The Times Online , 05 April 2009