The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [101]
To our Bronze Age ancestors who created the great monotheistic religions, the ability to create the world and life was godlike. Once we know the technology of creation, however, the supernatural becomes the natural. Thus my gambit: the only God that science could discover would be a natural being, an entity that exists in space and time and is constrained by the laws of nature. A supernatural God who exists outside of space and time is not knowable to science because he is not part of the natural world, and therefore science cannot know God.
This was the argument I made in a Templeton Foundation–sponsored print debate with theist and Harvard professor of medicine Jerome Groopman, who in his comments argued that God is “without form, immeasurable,” that he exists “in a dimension that cannot be quantitated or depicted by science,” that “we are unable to grasp fully God’s nature and dimensions,” and that “God exists outside of time and cannot be bound by space.” How then, I asked, do you know this God exists? As corporeal beings who form beliefs about the world based on percepts (from our senses) and concepts (from our minds), how can we possibly know a being who by definition lies outside of both our percepts and our concepts? At some point doesn’t God need to step into our space-time to make himself known in some manner—say through prayer, providence, or miracles? And if so, why can’t science measure such divine action? If there is some other way of knowing, say that of the mystics or the faithful through deep meditation or prayer, why couldn’t neuroscience say something meaningful about that process of knowing? If we came to understand—as studies with meditating monks and praying priests have shown—that a part of the parietal lobe of the brain associated with the orientation of the body in space is quiescent during such meditative states (breaking down the normal distinction one feels between self and nonself and thus making one feel “at one” with the environment), wouldn’t this imply that rather than being in touch with a being outside of space and time, it is actually just a change in neurochemistry?
In the end, in one of the most nakedly honest statements of belief that I have ever encountered, Groopman had to admit: “Why believe? I have no rational answer. The question seems to be in the domain of why do we love someone? You could reduce it to certain components, perhaps refer to neurotransmitters, but somehow the answer seems to transcend the truly knowable. This is the cognitive dissonance that people like me live with, and with which we often struggle.”30
On one level I have no rebuttal to this belief statement because none is necessary. If no empirical claim is made, then there is little more that science can say on the matter. Life can be a painful struggle and filled with mysteries, so whatever one needs to do to get through the day to find happiness and to bring some resolution to those nagging mysteries … well … who am I to argue? As declared in Psalms 46:1: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” On another level, however, I can’t help but think that had Groopman been born to Hindu parents in India rather than Jewish parents in the West, he would believe something entirely different about the ultimate nature of the universe that would be equally subject to justification through rational arguments.
What science offers for explaining the feelings we experience when believing in God or falling in love is complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. I find it deeply interesting