Putting Our Faith in Science

Materialism is a paradigm whose shift has come. Even as a casual reader of popular science, I feel I’m being told too often that modern brain scans have exposed my soul as an illusion, that evolutionary biology has consigned God to the junk heap of history, that physical matter, in short, is the only reality there is.

“ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” writes physicist Francis Crick.

And zoologist Richard Dawkins declares: “The evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design.”

Now, I’m just a guy who checks “spiritual but not religious” on the AOL surveys, but I question the authority of these men to make such declarations. Brilliant scientists they may be, but in this matter they’re like movie actors pronouncing on politics: They’re welcome to their opinions, but their ability in one field does not necessarily translate into insight in another. Yet, just like movie actors, their declarations are accorded far more media attention than they deserve.

One reason for this is that most mainstream media are secular -- more interested in the doings of Caesar than God. As far as I’m concerned, this is as it should be. I want my newspaper to give me the news, not mystic revelation. But as a result of this natural bias, the religious people who do receive media coverage tend to be the most doctrinaire: Their belief system is unyielding enough to have an effect on the everyday world.

So when science and faith are debated in the media, the chosen voice of faith is often the most hidebound and fundamentalist. Evolutionists are pitted against creationists, archeologists against biblical literalists. The science of today is allowed to argue its case against the religion of thousands of years ago. Any reasonable person would get the impression that faith hasn’t got a leg to stand on.

This impression is simply false.

It may be that natural selection, as Dawkins argues, explains biological complexity, and quantum physics, as chemist Peter Atkins has said, accounts for the creation of matter itself. But the origin and existence of these processes remains unexplained, their spiritual underpinnings open to speculation.

And more important -- to me anyway -- nothing science has come up with challenges our inner experiences of the divine. Most scientific arguments against these experiences boil down to the mistaken idea that if the mechanics of an internal phenomenon -- the mind, say, or religious ecstasy -- can be detailed, the phenomenon itself has been explained away. That is, if the “mind” is caused by the behavior of brain cells, then our experience of our selves is an illusion. If religious ecstasy can be photographed in a scan, then there’s nothing real to be ecstatic about.

This line of reasoning is what physicist-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” in which the abstract understanding of an event is mistaken for the event itself. “This is the ultimate irony of some modern science,” British theologian Keith Ward says, “that it begins by trying to explain and understand the rich, particular, concrete world as experienced by humans, and ends by seeing that phenomenal world as an illusion.”

It is this fallacy that ultimately confounds MIT psychologist Steven Pinker in his book “The Blank Slate.” Pinker derides the notion that human nature might be part of anything like a soul -- the “ghost in the machine,” as he calls it.

Yet even he can’t finally disentangle his materialistic explanations from the mysterious phenomena they supposedly explain.

“These puzzles have an infuriatingly holistic quality to them,” he writes with touching frustration. “Consciousness and free will seem to suffuse the neurobiological phenomena at every level. Thinkers seem condemned either to denying their existence or to wallowing in mysticism.”

But why is that infuriating? And if mysticism can reach a truth that science can’t, why is it wallowing?

Materialism, after all, is an interesting little idea -- but what’s it made of? If every brain that could think of it ceased to exist, would the idea itself be gone? Or would it still be there -- like the idea of our selves -- alive in a mind more enduring and mysterious than our own?

Andrew Klavan is an Edgar Award-winning crime novelist. His latest book, “Dynamite Road,” will be published by Forge in November.