Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [125]
It was a pointy-headed fight, to be sure, but we were a pointy-headed crowd: ten seasoned journalists1 invited by the Templeton Foundation and Cambridge University to observe as celebrities in the world of science unspooled their ideas about biology, string theory, and multiverses. What tagged these presentations as unusual was the question underlying them: Could God retain a place in the intelligent man’s world? Or, in this scientific age: Had God been reduced to a superstitious belief lacking any rational basis?
After eight days of lectures—and our polite but lethal grilling of the scientists—it seemed to me that God was losing.While many of the scientists claimed some sort of faith, generally Christian, they kept their spiritual beliefs in a sealed container where they would not contaminate the “real” work of understanding human consciousness and the universe we live in. I was witnessing a blitzkrieg of scientific materialism overrunning the quaint but untestable claims of God.
This irked me, especially when I realized that God could not win under the rules of twenty-first-century science. This was not Ali versus Frazier. This was the World Wrestling Federation. The decks were stacked, the outcome certain, the smack-down inevitable. The rules of this game—the paradigm of modern science—revolve around certain core beliefs. One of them dictates that scientists can study only what they can measure: the physical world and observable behavior. Try to investigate something that cannot be precisely measured—such as a spiritual experience that transforms a person’s life—well, that’s cause for immediate disqualification.
Another rule is the mind-brain paradigm: everything we are, see, feel, do, or think is a physical state, the electrical and chemical activity in three pounds of tissue called the brain. Mind, consciousness—forget about the soul—must be reduced to matter. It is a closed loop, excluding any notion of God or a spiritual realm.
But on that rainy morning in Cambridge I witnessed something extraordinary, akin to Dorothy spotting the little bald man pulling the levers of the Wizard of Oz. For only a moment, the curtain pulled back and we saw the fight for what it was: two belief systems duking it out.
John Barrow, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, was speed-walking us through the hypothesis of a “fine-tuned” universe that is exquisitely and astonishingly calibrated to allow for life. He explained the concept of “multiverses,” which posits that we live in one of 10,500 universes. Then he said, almost as an aside, “I’m quite happy with a traditional theistic view of the universe.”
He might as well have dropped an anvil on Richard Dawkins’s foot. Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and possibly the world’s most famous atheist, certainly one of the most militant. Two days earlier, Dawkins had delivered a talk that he believed would prove the impossibility of God, and which would later be published as a book called The God Delusion.2 He had remained in Cambridge to hear the lectures of other researchers, particularly the world-class John Barrow. When Barrow, who turned out to be an Anglican, mentioned his belief in God, Dawkins began roiling with frustration like a teakettle about to blow.
“Why on earth do you believe in God?” Dawkins blurted.
All heads turned to Barrow. “If you want to look for divine action, physicists look at the rationality of the universe and the mathematical structure of the world.”
“Yes, but why do you want to look for divine action?” Dawkins demanded.
“For the same reason that someone might not want to,” Barrow responded with a little smile, as all of us erupted in laughter—except for Dawkins.
So there you have it. The paradigm is not a law, it is a choice: a choice to look