Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [33]
We might not address all the vital questions at once, but the underlying substrate is always necessary to a scientific description. For a scientist, material mechanistic elements underlie the description of reality. The associated physical correlates are essential to any phenomenon in the world. Even if not sufficient to explain everything, they are required.
This materialist viewpoint works well for science. But it inevitably leads to logical conflicts when religion invokes a God or some other external entity to explain how people or the world behave. The problem is that in order to subscribe both to science and to a God—or any external spirit—who controls the universe or human activity, one has to address the question of at what point does the deity intervene and how does He do it. According to the materialist, mechanistic point of view of science, if genes that influence our behavior are a result of random mutations that allowed a species to evolve, God can be responsible for our behavior only if He physically intervened by producing that apparently random mutation. To guide our activities today, God had to influence the ostensibly random mutation that was critical to our development. If He did, how did He do that? Did He apply a force or transfer energy? Is God manipulating electrical processes in our brains? Is He pushing us to act in a certain way or creating a thunderstorm for any particular individual so he or she can’t get to their destination? On a larger level, if God gives purpose to the universe, how does He apply His will?
The problem is that not only does much of this seem silly, but that these questions seem to have no sensible answer that is consistent with science as we understand it. How could this “God magic” possibly work?
Clearly people who want to believe that God can intervene to help them or alter the world at some point have to invoke nonscientific thinking. Even if science doesn’t necessarily tell us why things happen, we do know how things move and interact. If God has no physical influence, things won’t move. Even our thoughts, which ultimately rely on electrical signals moving in our brains, won’t be affected.
If such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic—or simply not care.
This incompatibility strikes me as a critical logical impasse in methods and understanding. Stephen Jay Gould’s purportedly “nonoverlapping magisteria”—those of science, covering the empirical universe, and religion, extending into moral inquiry—do overlap and face this intractable paradox too. Though believers might relegate the latter to religion, and even though science has yet to answer some deep and fundamental questions of interest to humanity, once we talk about substance and activity—be it in and of the brain or in reference to celestial objects—we are in the domain of science.
RATIONAL CONFLICTS AND IRRATIONAL ESCAPE CLAUSES
However, the incompatibility doesn’t necessarily trouble all believers. It so happened that when I was on a plane ride from Boston to Los Angeles, I was seated next to a young actor who had trained as a molecular biologist, but who had some surprising views about evolution. Before embarking