We Will Find God in What We Know (1)

DAVID PORUSH, Ph.D.

Believers in science and believers in God have been trying to debunk each other for centuries, yet they are co-conspirators who share similar motives and goals: to seek the veiled unity of the world. Although most scientists resist it, they might soon come to the ineluctable (2) conclusion that an omniscient, purposeful, active universal intelligence must exist.

Indeed, many scientific hypotheses either directly suggest that a Godlike entity exists or they propose concepts so far-fetched or improbable that they require just as much faith: (3)

• Space, time, matter, and energy are fundamentally the same thing. We perceive them as distinct because of the illusions of our limited senses. Many physicists believe that all remaining problems will also prove to be projections of a grand unifying something. (4)

• What binds the universe across its vast span – over 95 billion light years – is the quantum entanglement of subatomic particles. Every bit of the cosmos is integrated with every other every instant. This also means, as mystics have said about God’s perspective, that there is no such thing as the “present,” “past,” and “future.”

• The universe is fine-tuned to produce life beyond all reasonable odds (think Planck’s constant, e.g.). This means either that:

     -- natural mechanisms with a combined improbability of one  in a trillion trillion were miraculously lucky or

     -- something intervened to create life.

• The universe had a single, undefined point of origin just before the Big Bang. Instead of saying something transcendent, science posits a one-off event, such as a “quantum fluctuation.” Alternatively, cosmology proposes that it is locked in a cycle of expansion and contraction without beginning or end, for which there is no evidence.

• Life began through improbable processes that still required a push by something: from complexity; or from molecules that replicate themselves arising spontaneously (the “RNA- world” hypothesis); or from metabolism somehow existing on its own to kickstart chemicals into life.

• Human consciousness arises somehow from the quantum entanglement of neurons or emergence from complexity. These are as abstract as the belief that God breathed souls into us.

• Every quantum (subatomic) event in the universe exists in a “superposition” of multiple probabilities before they collapse into one reality. There are trillions of quantum events happening every second in every cubic centimeter of space. This leads to two equally magical conclusions:

    -- either all the other probabilities become alternate universes so that there are that many trillions of new universes spawned every instant or

     -- something with inconceivably infinite awareness – Godlike – observes every one of these events to create what we call reality.

Put it all together and what emerges from science is the portrait of something that very much resembles the incomprehensibly omniscient, unitary, and creative God that lies beneath the different doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths.

Science’s job is not to ask the meaning and purpose of it all. But as science finishes its work, religion has been waiting patiently with its answer. We are here to acknowledge and contribute to a holy, God-given world. In its way, science is doing that.