A Perspective on Science and Religion

Blair M. Smith Geonworld Wellington, New Zealand December 4, 2011

On the Harmony of Science and Religion

A major source of conict and disunity in the world today is the widespread opinion that there is some basic opposition between science and religion, that scientic truth contradicts religion on some points, and that one must choose between being a religious person, a believer in God, or a scientist, a follower of reason. Adapted from William S. Hatcher and Douglas Martin, The Bah a Faith: The Emerging Global Religion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 87-89.

Lets begin with this meditation,

To begin our discussion, I am not so sure how widespread this belief of conict is, it certainly seems this way going by media reports and political conicts in the USA. But world-wide? I think more people have a healthy respect for both science and religion, but only, it must be said, those elements of religion concerning moral and ethical teachings. I suspect the good aspects of religion are still held in high regard by most people today, even atheists. In any case, the choice between being a religious person,. . . or a scientist is a false dichotomy. Historically science and religion have evolved in parallel with multiple connections and inuences, one upon the other. Let us dene science as the exploration of the physical universe using observation and experiment and the cyclical inquiry process of observationhypothesisexperimentationtesttheorizationprediction observation. The practice of science often departs extremely from this idealization, for example, some theories are proered in advance of experimentation straight from observation. In a sense observation sometimes serves as the experiment. Also, science often propounds false theories, and the progress of science is often halting and sporadic, and often very confused and messy. Fully worked out theories are quite rare. Religion is harder to dene and is for many people a personal state of mind. Let us, for the sake of discussion, dene two types of religion that are very dierent concepts. 1

1. Let S-religion (S for socially constructed) be the socially constructed practices and beliefs revolving around worship of a deity, including the social laws and norms arising therefrom. This denition is widely used by critics of religion, but is also a commonly understood usage of the term religion. 2. Let T-religion (T for transcendent religion) be the idea of a revelation of moral code and philosophy or theology dictated to a sentient peoples from a proclaimed manifestation of God. This denition is very problematic and complex. A number of additional terms need to be dened precisely, and it is often at odds with the common usage of the term. The reason for dening T-religion is because it more accurately captures the essence of what the worlds great S-religious traditions profess in their canonical scriptures. The issue is whether T-religion exists at all. Many philosophers would say no. S-religion exists manifestly, but there is no way to prove the validity of a claimed T-religion. This is the age-old problem of religious belief. Often belief in a T-religion is subjective, a state of mind of adherents, and cannot be objectively justied. Part of our discussion will be to what extent this places science at odds with T-religion or whether science and T-religion can be unied. The main consequence I want to point out is that if there is a valid T-religion then it must be in complete unity and harmony with validated science. Why? Because by denition the putative God would be the creator of all things (a universal uncaused cause in the terminology of Hatcher). All the ndings of science would then be part of this Gods creation and could not logically conict with a T-religion revealed by any valid Manifestation of this putative God. I will also note that the relatively recently proclaimed religious movement known as the Bah Faith expressly establishes the T-religious usage in Its scriptures. It a claims that true religion is in harmony with science, and in words echoed decades later by Einstein, the Bah canonical writings liken science and religion to two a wings of a bird, or like complementary parts of a whole, Einstein wrote,religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame, but decades before, Abdul-Bah the son of the founder of the Bah Faith wrote, a a Religion and science are the two wings upon which mans intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to y with one wing alone! Should a man try to y with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism. Abdul-Bah, Paris Talks (London: Bah Publishing Trust, 1969), a a p. 143. In another passage from the same work, He armed that the result of the practice of the unity of science and religion will be a strengthening of religion rather than its weakening as is feared by many religious apologists: 2

When religion, shorn of its superstitions, traditions, and unintelligent dogmas, shows its conformity with science, then will there be a great unifying, cleansing force in the world which will sweep before it all wars, disagreements, discords and strugglesand then will mankind be united in the power of the Love of God. Abdul-Bah, Paris Talks (London: Bah Publishing Trust, 1969), a a p. 146.

1.1

Physical Materialism and Atheism

The philosophers who claim there is no such thing as T-religion and never can be such a thing, base their arguments on a belief in physical materialismthe idea, among others, that there is nothing beyond the physical universe, and therefore no such thing as a transcendent Godcreator of the universe. The universe just is and that is all there is to things. This is a belief system called atheism. There are many ways atheism is justied (the paradox of good and evil, the Occams Razor argument), but the main one is this a priori belief that there is nothing outside of the physical universe. It is a problematic position that is in amazing conict with science. For one thing, science does not assume anything beyond what can be observed or measured directly or indirectly using physical apparatus. Many unobservable things are accepted by science, such as the inuences that cause the force of gravity. The force of gravity is observable but the stu that causes gravity is not, nevertheless, gravitons and curved spacetime are part of the accepted ontology of science. Yet atheism contains the a priori belief, an assumption, that there is no non-physical reality. This is a tremendously strong philosophical assumption quite at odds with the spirit of science. Why? Simply because science never assumes the non-existence of anything. Science is a positive philosophy in the sense of remaining open to the possibility of new ideas and unseen things1 .

1.2

The Possible Existence of T-Religion

A philosophy which is more sympathetic with science is agnosticismwhere one neither assumes God (and non-physical reality) exists nor the converse. We should note that it is a well known fact that no one has ever been able to prove the nonexistence of non-physical reality. So agnosticism without the atheistic assumptions is a tenable philosophical starting point for any beginning philosopher, amateur or professional. Our concern for the moment is whether the notion of a T-religion actually makes any sense. It is at rst such an outlandish idea that it seems to lack all credibility. I suspect most people would leave the notion open to subjective opinion and belief. Largely thanks to the Bah Faith I think we can do better. The Bah Faith a a is very strong on claiming that a valid T-religion can be embraced by anyone of
1 Not in the sense of early 20th century logical positivism which was bizarrely named because it is the antithesis of a positive view of metaphysics.

rational mind. A more or less systematic procedure is suggested called independent investigation of truth. The only presupposition is that there is an objective reality to the world. If one accepts this, then putting the possibility of cosmological multiple universes aside2 the implication is that there is an objective component to reality that all people can agree upon. Given this, it becomes possible to assess the claim of any putative T-religion against evidence. First there is the fact that a valid T-religion would naturally proclaim itself to be such. The radical notion of a T-religion moreover demands that the founder or founders of the T-religion are not normal human beings, but are somehow enlightened by mystic or spiritual insight. In principle such enlightenment is no dierent in nature to scientic insight and artistic creativity, although one has to admit it would be of an entirely greater order for the founder of a T-religion. But this is too outlandish a claim to be taken for granted. One cannot accept a T-religion as valid just because the professed founder says so. The next standard of evidence must be the life and teachings of the founder or founders of the claimed T-religion. This is where an element of subjectivity comes into play, since we have no clear denition of what a T-religion should look like. However, certain norms of agnostic theology (philosophy of divinity that does not assume the existence of divinity) suggest that there is no real problem in assessing the relative truth of a T-religion. Firstly, the teachings of the T-religion should be open for inspection, otherwise it could not be benecial to all humanity. Secondly, the teachings would be spiritual in nature, and would include social laws governing physical life only as adjuncts. The idea is that a sound code of morals and ethics based upon spiritual ideals such as love, justice, honesty, compassion, wisdom, mercy and so forth, should be part of the teachings. This may seem pretty vague as a criteria of evidence for a valid T-religion, but upon deep enough thought I think most rational people will agree that this is clear evidence that can be meaningfully and fairly assessed. The next standard of evidence would concern the life of the founder. Any being inspired by such a revelation of spiritual knowledge would surely not live a life that contradicts their own teachings. So we can use this evidence as a lter if you like. It allows us to fairly clearly distinguish between false prophets who may have borrowed moral ideas from previous philosophers and applied them to create a new sect in their name. If this claimant does not live a life in accord with their own teachings then we cannot be expected to take them seriously. The Bah teachings go further a and suggest we should not take such persons seriously period. Or at least, we would do so at our peril. The last main standard of evidence for a valid T-religion is that it should have enough potency to become surrounded by a core following of faithful adherents who embody Its ideals and are a source of good. Whether this is due to mystical potency or merely the forcefulness and logic of the ideals is largely irrelevant. My personal opinion is that it is sucient to judge a claimed T-religion by the moral consistency and logic of its ideals. This is really no dierent to having faith in a
Multiple universes does not actually pose any problem, we just want to simplify the discussion here.
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good scientic theory. When two or more competing scientic theories are advanced contemporaneously it is usual for practitioners to favour the theory that is more parsimonious and otherwise favour the more beautiful and elegant theory. Such considerations are also criteria for assessing the validity of a claimed T-religion. To some people it is a novel idea to judge a religion by how powerful it is as a source of good. The Bah view is that this is essential for identifying a valid a T-religion. In other words, this is perhaps the harshest criteria. If something is not a fource for good then it is not a valid T-religion. We might mention in this connection people who commit terrrorist acts in the name of religion. The religion they claim to represent may unfr=ortunatle have originally been derived from a vlid T-religion. However, it is obvious in these instances that the adherents have corrupted the pure T-religion, it has become an S-religion. An S-religion may be an inspiration ofr terrorists, but by denition a T-religion cannot be an inspiration for evil. There is more about the independent investigation of truth in the Bah writings. a It is a principle that brings the search for religious truth into great harmony with the search for scientic truth. We do not have to rely upon blind faith or deeply subjective experiences. * * *

Now I want to examine some modern cross-overs between science and religion

Can Science Ever Be Complete?

The short answer to this question is that we can never know the full potential scope of science, but by denition science is limited to making statements about physical reality. So the best we can say for sure is that if there is non-physical reality within human conception and validation then science is incomplete as a description of reality, but might still be able to oer us a nearly complete description of physical reality. This is an important point because if science turns out to show that the physical universe is causally closed (deterministic in some sense) then the existence of non-physical reality becomes problematic, although not paradoxical. One might still validly believe in the existence of non-physical reality, such as ones putative soul, it is just that science would be telling us that the human soul would have no observable physical eect. It might have other eects such as conscious thought which cannot be objectively observed by science. There are many areas of life traditionally controlled by religion that are being swept under the province of science. This leads many materialist philosophers to claim that eventually they will have enough scientic fuel to destroy the usefulness of religion entirely. These are interesting claims that deserve some scrutiny. One area where religion has always, and continues, to hold sway is human morality and ethics. S-Religion provides us with codes of moral law handed down from the scriptures of putative T-religions. Some people claim that this is absolutely the last hold of religion over modern society, and if it can be toppled then we will enter a 5

new age of enlightenment, one perhaps surpassing the great European 15th16th century enlightenment.

2.1

A Science of Morality

If science is to be complete then it would need to furnish us with a theory of morality. This project has recently been begun by a few sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. The idea is to dene a notion of human ourishing. This could be a complex uid evolving notion, it neednt be dened by one single set of rigid factors. With such an evolving notion in agreement human actions could then be assessed according to some sort of scheme that qualitatively measures the impact on human ourishing. This would give rise to a scientic system of morality. We would be objectively able to decide what is right and what is wrong. This project is fairly na one has to conclude, yet it is hard to rule out that ve someday such an objective basis for morality will not be possible. The major aw is that most of the human world operates chaotically, in the technical scientic sense of the word chaos, which means a non-linear system that is sensitive to initial conditions. This makes the outcomes of human decisions remarkably hard to predict, especially in long term consequences. It is harder to predict the eect of human actions than it is to predict the weather. The trouble is that if perfect weather predictions are desired for the long term, say a few months out, then we really will never have a hope of delivering, not unless we can gain almost perfect prediction of the entire future of the movement of air molecules and ocean water. Chaos theory implies that weather prediction will always be hard, meaning that longer term prediction will always require more data than can currently be gathered if one can currently only predict for shorter times with all available data. Such is the situation with the use of a scientic notion of human ourishing. No matter what happens, the overwhelming likelihood is that a future science of morality will arrive at exactly the same universal principles as T-religion. If it doesnt would that invalidate T-religion? Not necessarily because there is no way to ever prove that moral codes based upon the putative science of human ourishing have any priority or superiority over T-religious authority. Why not? Because the science of morality would have to always be based upon a set of primitive suppositions about what ourishing means. Since this is a subjective decision, presumably taken by world-wide consensus, it is open to debate and refutation, or at the very least open to editing and change over time. Morality derived from religious tradition is more absolute in practice, yet also changes with time according to the Bah concept of progressive revelation (no T-religion is nal) and oneness a of religion (all T-religions have the same divine unknowable source). What doesnt change in T-religion is the essence of morality, the ideals of truth, justice, love, compassion, mercy and so on. The application of thee ideals depends upon contingent needs and changing dictates of physical life. When the ideal principles of T-religion are put into practice they cannot avoid becoming pragmatic in application. For example, does a physician knowing the power of hope and happiness on the mind and body, reveal to an ill patient they are dying with no chance 6

of recovery? If they value honesty above the Hippocratic oath to never do harm to a patient then they may conceal the truth and provide as much positive comfort as they can honestly prescribe. Taking a nuanced view there is no real conict of ideals here, but there is a pragmatic concern about how to implement honesty in a way that does not harm the patient. In reality in cases of severe illness a physician never really knows that a patient is truly terminal, they only have statistics to base their assessment upon, and statistics can always be deed. So there is always room for change. Neither T-religion nor scientic morality based upon ourishing are xed and unchanging. There is reason to believe there will be a conuence of these dierent sources of moral pragmatism.

2.2

A Science of Consciousness

One other main province of religion that science so far has not impeached upon is the existence and nature of the human soul. However, many philosophers regard the primary rationale for belief in the human soul to be the rst-person subjective experience of consciousness. The feeling is that if science can explain consciousness then there will be no need for religious notions of human souls that need to be saved or redeemed by some sort of subjugation to religious belief. The Bah Faith is clear in stating the the human soul is a reality and that it is a moreover and abstract reality, like the number or the idea of a perfect circle or the idea of perfect love. These are all abstract realities. It is also clear from the writings of the Bah Faith that the conscious mind is a manifestation of the human soul. a So if a science of consciousness can be developed and founded purely upon physics and biology then the Bah Faith cannot be a valid T-religion. a This may sound like bad news if you favour the Bah Faith. But it is not so bad. a Further advances in articial intelligence (AI) might produce digital programmes and machines that are outwardly conscious in behaviour, but there is no possible physical way to test for the actual existence of rst-person subjective consciousness. How can I know this? Well, by denition, subjective sentient states of awareness cannot be inspected by objective means. So there cannot be a fully developed science of consciousness. At best science can hope for a more or less complete theory of behavioural psychology based upon brain-mind studies and correlations. But correlates of consciousness is the best data science can hope to gather. This means actual data about subjective consciousness is physically impossible to gather rst hand. It must be passed on to an experimenter by a conscious subject. In fact it must be passed on by an assumed conscious subject. The experimentalist never knows whether their patient is a real human or a zombiea creature that acts human but has nothing going on inside their mind. I hope you realize this does not mean conscious robots are impossible. Maybe AI research will produce conscious machines. The trouble is we could never perform any physical experiment that would prove the existence of sentient subjective awareness in such machines, because we cannot even do this for ourselves. I am writing these words on this page but how do you know I am thinking them as thoughts, maybe the universe has simply programmed me to do this and in reality I have no free will 7

in the matter, and inside my brain is nothing, a zombie emptiness, there is no I in my head. This can never be conrmed or denied by any scientic methods.

2.3

The Human Soul

Before any disharmony between science and religion can be established concerning the nature of human thought, we need to clarify what T-religion says about the human soul. I will again take the Bah Faith as the nearest model of T-religion a available. According to Bahullh, a a spirit, mind, soul, hearing and sight are one but dier through differing causes. Bahullh, cited in Studies in Immortality, Star of the West XIV, a a p. 8. The idea is that the mind, the rational soul, the inner power of sight and hearing are all aspects of a single consciousnessor spiritintermediated through dierent channels. Abdul-Bah elaborates, a It is the same reality which is given dierent names according to the dierent conditions wherein it is manifested. . . when it governs the physical functions of the human body, it is called the human soul; when it manifests itself as the thinker, the comprehender, it is called mind; And when it soars into the atmosphere of God, and travels to the spiritual world, it becomes designated as spirit. Abdul-Bah, Promulgation of Universal Peace, Wilmette: US Bah a a Publishing Trust. 1982, p. 259. If the power of thought can ever be proven by science to reside in purely physical causes then this would cause potential conict with this T-religion view of the origin of human thought and consciousness. However, for reasons previously given, it is unlikely science can ever make any progress towards understanding the inner subjective character and origin of thought and consciousness. It is nevertheless important that cognitive science tries to understand consciousness and thought. These puzzles are important drivers of scientic progress. One has to wary though of pseudo-science that has its goal the pursuit of physically unprovable hypotheses. We will discuss AI and consciousness again. For now, we will rest the case of science in harmony with T-religion by simply noting that science can never invalidate the belief that you or I have a non-physical soul.

2.4

The Purpose of Life

Religion provides a motivating purpose for human civilization. We do not need to review the details here. Science does not comment on purposes of life. So in this area of philosophy there is no conict between science and T-religion, and perhaps not even a conict with S-religion. In Bah philosophy the motivating purposes in life are described as two-fold, a 8

1. For individuals the purpose of life is to acquire divine perfections (spiritual attributes) in order to become closer to knowing and loving God. 2. The purpose of society is to advance civilisation materially and spiritually. Science does not study spiritual attributes, and so there is no conict between science and religion regarding the purpose of life. There is just very little overlap. Science is however extremely useful for enabling human civilization to ourish, to reduce material dependencies and thus to create more time for spiritual growth. At the turn of the 21st century most human free time enabled by advances in food and living technology has been used to increase the pursuit of leisure. This is not a bad thing but is seen as sub-optimal by most religious teachings. So contemplating the purpose of life we see that religion is complementary to science.

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3.1

Questions of Origin
Origin of Life

One area where science has seemingly completely toppled religion is in explaining the evolution of life. This is a somewhat hollow victory for science however. Many adherents of religion have absolutely no problem in believing the theory of evolution, that humans have descended from apes and they in turn from some small shrewlike mammalian amphibious ancestor and they in turn from some primeval protozoa back about 3 billion years in the Earths history. The controversy over the origin of life is primarily a literalistic Christian dilemma, for those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible and the Book of Genesis in particular, they have major conict with modern science. In this case one can agree that science of this particular form of S-religion are in complete disharmony. According to Bah principles this means literalistic Christianity cannot be part of a a valid T-religion. Thus, the scientic explanations for the origin of life are not in conict with true religion.

3.2

Origin of the Universe

The most recent theory on the origin of the universe is the ekpyrotic brane theory, borrowing ideas from superstring and M-theory3 . It seeks to explain the Big Bang theory using the idea that our universe is actually only a 4D surface embedded in a higher dimension 5D multiverse. The Big Bang, or event like it, occur when two 4D brane worlds collide. This theory is about as religious as science can get. This is colourful stu, and even if false, it is a remarkable accomplishment of the human mind to even get so close to understanding the origin of the universe.
These were theories dreamed up in the 1970s to try to explain nuclear forces, which were then rened in the 1980s to try to explain all the forces of nature, including gravity. Because of the incredible density of matter and energy gravity is of course the main driving force in any Big Bang theory.
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However, none of these theories of origin of the universe are actually theories about the origin of physical reality. We have good ideas about how our particular universe might have arisen from a prior singularity or ekpyrotic collision event, but these theories, none of them, can explain why there is any physical reality in the rst place. The great physicists John A. Wheeler once mused that if the complete equations governing physics could ever be discovered and written down they would instantly and spontaneously spring to life because they would be so compelling. But the fact is equations cannot bring themselves to life. Our universe did not start out as an equation on a sheet of paper in some other higher dimensional physicists worldat least no one believes this sort of story. You may come across scientists and philosophers who oer a religion-free version of an origin to all of physical reality. One type of story goes that there is no need to explain physical reality, since it just is. Now it may be so that our universe is essentially timeless, that there was no zero point in time. This is probably the most plausible concept of time that can be ascertained from modern physics. However, to claim that this obviates the need for a creator, a prime cause of all things, seems to be philosophical nonsense. It is like postulating this loaf of bread here came into existence without a baker. I personally nd such scientic myths as implausible as some S-religious claims. I do not wish to dismiss them from serious critique4 , but I will do so in these notes. The other type of story is that quantum uncertainty allows physical matter to appear from nothing. However this is quasi-scientic nonsense. The truth that physicists have discovered with quantum theory is simply that an existing spacetime is not a total vacuum. Where there is spacetime there are virtual particles that pop into and out of existence in ashes of nanoseconds or less. Even in these seemingly random events there is structure and order. Virtual particles are always created in pairs, a particle and its antiparticle. But these processes can only take place in an existing spacetime. They cannot spring up from utter nothingness. So there is no theory of quantum mechanics that can explain how physical reality came into being. The idea that physical reality is timeless is more philosophically and scientically plausible.

Truth and Relativity

I mention this topic because it can be co-opted by science to thwart religious ideals. But we will see there is a huge problem with this view. The gist of the idea is that all truth is culturally constructed. So no one can claim absolute knowledge. This is not a scientic proposal about epistemology. It is an idea that originated with post-modern philosophical schools of thought closely associated with social anthropology, sociology, and feminist studies. The usefulness of relativity is however dubious, since on simple empirical evidence it seems there is plenty of knowledge and facts that every culture agrees upon. Often cultural
4 These ideas do deserve serious attention because the idea that the universe needs no causal originator is not obviously logically false.

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dierences are not truly incompatible either, merely dierent ways of expressing and understanding knowledge. For example, Greek then Arabic then European mathematics uses a common thread of knowledge that we all learn about in school. But in some societies that were disconnected by millennia from Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek thought have come up with dierent systems of mathematics. However, when these alternate systems are logically analysed they always turn out to be totally compatible with modern mathematics. Mathematics does appear to be a cultural universal and absolute. There is however a great deal of merit to the ideas of cultural relativism. At the very least the ideas give us pause to think how other people may see the world dierently. This is an important notion. Learning to think or empathise with other people and entire other cultures is an important tool in any modern peace advocates kit. However it does not mean that there is no objective truth about reality. Some people might ague that sure enough physical reality is reasonably objectively describable (despite the uncertainties in measurements due to quantum mechanics). Yet, they may argue, spiritual reality, our inner private subjective understanding of the world, is irreducibly subjective and non-universal. Such ideas are highly contentious and are not really open to scientic investigation, because there is no scientic theory of consciousness. We will talk more about this later in the topic on free will. The point is that it is hard to ague with people who want to believe that human consciousness and spirituality is a totally relative phenomenonthat there is no absolute nature to spiritual realitythat it is all in our private mind, so to speak. Well, again, we can point out that such notions are not scientic. Thought they may be valid. They also do not eect the relationship between science and religion, which remains in harmony despite any truth to cultural or spiritual relativism. Besides this, there is one great aw in any theory of relativism of truth. If one rmly believes that truth is not absolute, then one mus deny the truth of this very claim. So relativism in truth is self-defeating. It is like the Russell paradox of mathematical set theory. Let R be the set of all sets x that are not members of themselves. So is R a member of itself or not? There is no way to decide. The Bah teachings stress the fundamental harmony of science and religion. a This view derives from the belief that truth (or reality) is one. For if truth is indeed one, it is not possible for something to be scientically false and religiously true. Abdul-Bah expressed forcefully this idea in the following passage: a If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation. Abdul-Bah, The Promulgation of Universal Peace (Wilmette: Bah a a Publishing Trust, 1922. 2nd edition 1982, p. 181. 11

The AI Singularity

Sometime towards the latter quarter of this century it has been predicted computing power will have advanced to the level of full brain simulation. The rest of the human body is pretty much a life support organ for the brain. So couple a full brain simulation with a rudimentary virtual world and you have the possibility of full edged human life in an electronic digital world. This would allow human civilization to escape the terrible ineciencies and excesses of living on the physical planet. We would just need to replicate our brain patterns in online simulations. This would require even more advanced technologyincreased resolution of MRI and computed tomographic brain scans to fully encode the information of our brains in digital snapshots. This technology is foreseen as available sometime towards the end of this century or most optimistically as soon as 2050. When these technologies come into being (and it is probably a matter of when not if) then this moment in history will be the AI singularity. Why is it so important and epochal in terms of human history? One reason is that no one has ever gured out how to produce conscious states in machines. We dont even know whether other animals are conscious. In fact we dont know whether we are all conscious. At best, only I can presume other people are conscious because they are born in the same way I am, and I know I am conscious, and other people exhibit similar behaviour that can only be attributed to some form of conscious awareness. Hopefully you can do the same! The problem of consciousness thus maybe seems to be merely philosophical consciousness cannot be proven, but it can be inferred without too much controversy or doubt. But it is not just a philosophical problem. We do not know if persistently vegetative patients suering from coma are conscious or not for example. If they are not conscious then there is a good case for treating them as basically dead, making termination of costly life support a valid moral option. But if they are conscious then terminating life support would be legal murder. There is another reason why the problem of consciousness is of practical concern, we will see why shortly. In the movie The Matrix the machine agents were right to think of humans as a cancer on the planet Earth. Everywhere humans live the rest of the planets life suers, and humans have probably been responsible for hundreds of extinctions of species every week for the past hundred years or more since the industrial revolution (the exact gure is a matter of dispute, but the gross account is not). So there are incentives for the planet Earth, if not for individuals, to get started living in digital form. There is one big danger about the AI singularity. What if we scan and upload our brains into digital worlds but these entities end up not sharing our consciousness, or worse, perhaps they will not be conscious at all? There is no way to know because, as discussed above, there is no physical test for the existence of consciousness. Consciousness is a subjective state, not objective, although it does in most usual circumstances give rise to certain behaviour, especially intelligence, this is no proof of subjective conscious awareness within an entity. Do we really have to worry though? 12

A possible scenario might go as follows. We get a volunteer (there are already thousands of people lining up for this) willing to have their brain scanned and uploaded into a digital environment with a full physical simulation. If the digital person starts doing unpredictably human-like things and communicating like a real person then there will be little cause to worry about the philosophical nuances of whether the new entity is conscious or not. It would be morally objectionable to terminate their life by shutting down the computer network upon which they depend. However, before entrusting all of our species to going digital it might be wise to keep a few billion organic humans around to keep the computer network running while robotics advances to the state of being able to self-repair and build new computer networks and explore the cosmos in interstellar spacecraft. Demanding anything less before permanently and completely going digital as a species would be profoundly stupid. Furthermore, I am sure many people would refuse to go digital and could probably rationalise this decision on religious, ethical and humanitarian grounds. As a safeguard it would also be wise to solve the problem of rejuvenation of an extinct species from preserved cellular material or DNA, or even just from the digital information of a genomevia synthesis of embryonic cells from scratch. These are enormous technological challenges which will ensure organic humans survive for a long time to come if we can avoid our own extinction due to climate change or the disaster of an asteroid impact or worse. Now is any of this incompatible with a religious world-view? Personally I nd it hard to see anything about an AI singularity that would invalidate the claims of a putative T-religion. I suspect many S-religions would fall out of favour though. If one is committed to the ideology that human consciousness is non-physical in origin then one might have to give up on this religion if human life is seen to ourish both scientically, artistically and creatively in digital worlds. But if T-religion of some form is valid then what could one conclude other than that the Creator designed the human soul (whatever it is, physical in pattern or not) to exist in any functional form of the requisite complexity. What is so special about DNA? We share all the same biological components and functions as any other species, so the human soul does not appear to depend upon biology. In fact the success of AI singularity would be in a strange way evidence that the human soul is not physical in origin. The idea is the metaphor or analogy of the softwarehardware duality. Descartes thought that humans had a dual aspect, the physical body and brain and the non-physical soul and mind. These days Cartesian dualism is hugely out of vogue, but not for good reasons, mainly because the ideas of Descartes are widely misunderstood. The computer analogy helps recover a valid form of Cartesian duality. Computer programs are really ideas. They can exist in many dierent software forms, such as dierent programming languages, and in many dierent versions of hardware, such as dierent computer architectures and operating systems that run the software. Virtual machine technology is a clear demonstration of the duality of computer programmesthese days you do not even need dedicated hardware to run a programme. The analogy with human consciousness is clear. Perhaps human consciousness is an abstract entity that exists and has 13

inner life independently of how it is implemented or instantiated. If so, then there is no reason to dogmatically believe that only humans born from DNA and cells can be conscious. The AI singularity would be empirical proof that the human mind really is not dependent upon biology, and hence is not really a physical thing, but more like a pattern that can exist in many dierent substrates. Furthermore it would lend credence to the notion that if there is a non-physical reality or higher dimensions to the cosmos, then human consciousness could perhaps transcend our known 4D universe and survive in some form independently. There is no theory about this, but it is a logical possibility that would only be supported by the eventuality of an AI singularity. These issues are moot at present because we have no proof that minds will be able to survive uploading into digital brains. In any case, the AI singularity would not invalidate a true religion. Interestingly, the Bah Faith does comment on the irreducible nature of the a human soul, The soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel. Bahullh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahullh, Wilmette: a a a a Bah Publishing Trust, 1976, pp. 158-59. a This is interesting because it means we can never really understand our own souls. We can only know the nature of the human soul from what it manifests, by its properties, for its essence is inscrutable. In commenting on the immortality of the rational soul, Abdul-Bah explained that everything in creation which is composed a of elements is subject to decomposition: The soul is not a combination of elements, it is not composed of many atoms, it is of one indivisible substance and therefore eternal. It is entirely out of the order of the physical creation; it is immortal! Abdul-Bah, Paris Talks, 11th ed., London: Bah Publishing Trust, a a 1969, p. 91. There is some bearing on the possible AI singularity. For example, how can the human soul be inscrutable and beyond our comprehension if we can replicate its appearance in digital form? I do not think this question makes much sense. Just because we might be able to capture human life in digital form would not mean we have any greater inkling about the nature of human creativity and insight and the things that are commonly attributed to the property of beings with immaterial souls. The AI singularity would not be a proof that the human soul is physical and material in origin. It would merely suggest that human consciousness is a pattern manifested in physical reality that can be supported by various dierent information carrying substrates. None of these ndings would be in contradiction to any known T-religious conceptions of the human soul. 14

The Omega Singularity

This is another type of technological singularity not often discussed in the science versus religion debates. It is the idea that our universe will inevitably suer from either a gravitational collapse or a thermodynamic cooling death. In the thermodynamic cooling death all massive particles could eventually decay into pure light, and then there would be no meaning to scales of length and time, such a cosmos would for all intents and purposes resemble a singularity itself like the pre-Big Bang. So the universe could conceivably undergo another Big Bang event and life might continue, eternally. In the gravitational collapse scenario the universe would become incredibly dense and life would have to evolve into a form of near pure energy to be able to sustain itself in the rapidly collapsing phase. The cosmologist Paul Tipler has worked out that an advanced civilization could manage to use the increasingly dense matter to construct ever more powerful computers that would be capable of exponentially faster computations over time, so that although the universe would eventually collapse, the human computations would survive and eventually grow so powerful that they would be capable of supporting life indenitely, living at an exponentially fast rate of change, and essentially becoming god-like at the nal Big Crunch. When a civilization becomes god-like then all bets are o. We can only guess that the collapse of the universe would be nothing to such a civilization, they could cope and survive either by progressing to innitely rapid life or by transcending the collapse entirely somehow by exploiting quantum mechanical alternative histories. This fanciful notion is called the Omega point by Tipler. Its a fantastic thing to think about, but it does not really produce any serious conict with T-religion. If a civilization ever becomes god-like this would be only with respect to total omnipotence and omniscience about physical reality. The human spiritual dimension would be either unaltered or enhanced. That is about all I have to say about the Omega singularity for now.

Free Will

This is the last topic I will discuss. It is the only philosophical topic where in my mind there is an unresolved debate between the borders of science and religion. Free will is normally something people want to believe in, after all, we feel like we are free, at least free to think and do whatever the laws of physics will allow. We can think about walking on thin air or levitating against gravity unaided, but physics prevents us. But when given a choice between a red pill and a blue pill we feel intuitively that there is no law of physics that is forcing us to opt for one or the other. But are we fooling ourselves? Our brain is under complete control of the laws of physics, so maybe our brains have evolved this trick of making us think we are in control, when in fact we are not. This is called the multiple re-write theory of consciousness and free will. The way it works is that the human brain interprets

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actions that it conveys to the body and writes them upon working memory as if they originated from the distributed pattern in our brains that is equated with conscious self image. This trick allows the brain to both perceive itself and thus form a selfimage, which in turn can be tricked into thinking it has autonomous control. How does the brains self-image think though? Well, as best I can tell from this theory (which is not very scientic), thinking is explained as a model of the self-image from within the self-image. Assuming brains can do such computational tricks, then we might concede it is plausible that free will is an illusion. The theory is not really well worked out though and it doesnt really explain the subjective qualitative feeling of thinking (not for me anyway, maybe it does adequately describe what other philosophers feel, which might explain why they accept this theory). The reasons why evolution by natural selection would have engineered this unique capacity in human brains is a mystery that no-one has fully explained with any degree of satisfaction. The problem for evolutionary psychologists working on this topic is that any theory of the biological evolution of consciousness must confront the fact that it is a massive waste of resources for a brain to perform so much computation that consciousness eventually emerges, when all the same actions and behaviour could take place without subjective awareness. In other words, if free will is really an illusion then there can be no selective pressure for organisms to evolve consciousness. If free will is illusory then consciousness confers no evolutionary survival or adaptive advantage, and therefore must be considered a relic and inecient, albeit miraculous, side-eect of human evolution. Consciousness is an accident. This is pretty good motive for taking the reality of free will seriously. Suppose it is not an illusion. The problem then is how can we square this with the laws of physics, which seem pretty deterministic. If our brains are determined by physical laws then where is there any room for free will? And how can free will inuence our actions if it is not a physical property? This is the age old soulbody problem. Current thinking is, I think, converging to the view that free will is not a property of brains. It is thought of instead, like consciousness, as a pattern that just happens to exist in a certain physical form, i.e., the brain for now. It might exist in other forms we are not aware of, and we only have a feeling of free will because we are experiencing the present physical form. Who knows what happens to the pattern after the death of our brains. It cannot physically survive, but that does not rule out some sort of connection with a continued spiritual reality. So much about the link between the spiritual and the physical is unknown and a complete mystery to science. Most people give up thinking about it. The less said about the mind-brain connection and the physical-spiritual link the safer one is for avoiding dispute. But this is not to say these questions are pointless.

7.1

Determinism and Free Will

Lets go back to the problem of determinism in a slightly dierent form. A good argument against the reality of truly free will is that it is incompatible with the concept of an omnipotent God. This is not an issue for atheists, and it is an argument that sways agnostics towards belief in atheism especially if they covert 16

their free will and do not want to relinquish it. The argument is that since God (if God exists) knows all and is all-powerful, nothing can be done without Gods foreknowledge, and nothing can be done without the say or will of God to let it be done. If all our actions are so foretold by God and indeed caused by God, then what possible meaning can there be left for so-called free will? Determinists say there is no room left for truly free will, it is an illusion that God allows us to enjoy (or is perverse enough to let us suer some would say). Other people have argued for subtler notions of free will that endow humans with a variety of freedom. But in the nal analysis if one adheres to determinism then free will is largely an illusion. Does this cause a conict between science and religion? I personally cannot see one. T-religion does sometimes remark upon the nature of the human soul and confers upon it a variety of autonomy. But everything has a cause. If a thing or action or decision is truly due to random chance then it can no more be a result of agency than a thing which is caused by physical law or God. The issue is about cause and chance. An absolute cause implies there is no chance. Maybe human consciousness and free will are only random for all practical purposes, and the agency of free will appears to be due to random forces, but in reality is some sort of inscrutable causal process. Random for all practical purposes means that the thing cannot be predicted with less data than complete foreknowledge. Since this is a power only given to a putative God, by denition, it implies that if free will is to be found anywhere it is to be found as originating directly from God. I have not summarized the state of science and religion on the matter of free will and determinism. I dont think there is a case to answer anyway, since science has very little to say about free will. It is a topic that is still dominated by philosophy. There is, however, one curious experiment done that may have inuenced the debate about free will. This is Benjamin Libets experiment on the timing of consciously reported volitions. Human subjects report the will to move their hands or ngers only six full milliseconds after their brain produces the neural impulses that are precursors to moving their hands. The brain seems to be acting ahead of our free will. This has caused many scientists to suspect that free will is an illusion. Such hypotheses are premature. The six millisecond delay could have many other causes, or could be an experimental artefact, and we cannot tell how long it takes for a subject to get the communication out of their body, maybe their free will had the volition and made the decision well before the six millisecond build up of neural activity? Too much is open to interpretation to make denitive conclusions.

7.2

Libertarianism and Free Will

The converse to determinism is libertarianism. This not associated with political libertarianism. It is the idea that the laws of physics are not complete, they leave some things in nature up to chance. Where there is an element of chance libertarians argue, there is a possibility that some non-physical agency can step in, so to speak, to determine the course of physical time evolution. This pushes the issues of 17

determinism away from the physical sphere to some putative non-physical realm. The problem with libertarianism is that if brains do not cause our decisions then what does? Who or what is the I that causes free will decisions? If free will is located in random quantum mechanical uctuations then it would seem to be acausal. But if nothing causes free will what meaning is there to the notion? Surely, if free will is not an illusion, something, the self the I, must cause our willed decisions? The Bah Faith articulates something relevant to these questions. The fact we a know the Sun will rise tomorrow does not cause the Sun to rise. The fact that a God could know what we are going to decide, has complete foreknowledge of our actions, does not cause these actions. So foreknowledge does not imply causation. Abdul-Bah wrote a penetrating, or maybe abstruse (depending on your point a of view), short commentary on free will. At the beginning of his commentary he seems to arm the reality of the autonomy of human free will, and that it is an innate power of the human soul, the soul being manifested in physical form has some measure of determination in physical aairs. This question is one of the most important and abstruse of divine problems. If God wills, another day, at the beginning of dinner, we will undertake the explanation of this subject in detail; now we will explain it briey, in a few words, as follows. Some things are subject to the free will of man, such as justice, equity, tyranny and injustice, in other words, good and evil actions; it is evident and clear that these actions are, for the most part, left to the will of man. But there are certain things to which man is forced and compelled, such as sleep, death, sickness, decline of power, injuries and misfortunes; these are not subject to the will of man, and he is not responsible for them, for he is compelled to endure them. But in the choice of good and bad actions he is free, and he commits them according to his own will. Abdul-Bah, Some Answered Questions, US Bah Publishing Trust, a a 1990, p. 305. But then later, in the same commentary also arms to omnipotence of God, as ultimate cause of all things: In the same way, in all the action or inaction of man, he receives power from the help of God; but the choice of good or evil belongs to the man himself. So if a king should appoint someone to be the governor of a city, and should grant him the power of authority, and should show him the paths of justice and injustice according to the laws if then this governor should commit injustice, although he should act by the authority and power of the king, the latter would be absolved from injustice. But if he should act with justice, he would do it also through the authority of the king, who would be pleased and satised. That is to say, though the choice of good and evil belongs to man, under all circumstances he is dependent upon the sustaining help of life, 18

which comes from the Omnipotent. The Kingdom of God is very great, and all are captives in the grasp of His Power. The servant cannot do anything by his own will; God is powerful, omnipotent, and the Helper of all beings. Ibid. It is a puzzle to reconcile these two ideas. First we should realize that a suciently powerful being should logically be able to cause a thing and yet grant an autonomous agency free control. At rst this seems like a paradox, but if the logic can be resolved then there is of course nothing to worry about. One does have to get ones head around this awesome concept of a Being so powerful that It could simultaneous determine and cause all things and yet grant autonomous agency over a limited domain to entities in Its creation. The way I like to gure this out is by a computer simulation analogy. Suppose you are a very, very gifted computer programmer, and you have simulated an entire digital world and ecosystem, complete with autonomous agents. You write the code and run the simulation and work out all possible words that could evolve. To do this you may need a quantum processor5 . Then for some reason you run the same simulation on another computer. You will in principle have complete foreknowledge of what your autonomous agents will do, since you have sampled all possible evolutions. So does this mean your autonomous entities were really not autonomous? This gedankenexperiment is really hard to envisage, but it should give you some idea of how to interpret Abdul-Bahs explanation of free will. I think an appropria ate sound-bite would be to say that the Bah conception of free will is a relative a one. Free will exists in degrees. Subatomic particles and atoms have virtually no free will, animals have some sort of autonomy, and humans have near maximal free will within physical constraints. Only God has absolute free will.

7.3

The Conway-Kochen Free Will Theorem

Mentioning the minimalistic degree of free will attributable to say photons and electrons is a nice segue into some cool quantum physics. The point of this section is to show you that even subatomic particles have a variety of free will. I will give a non-technical summary of the theorem, which is a theorem derived from the rules of relativistic quantum physics. Consider a fundamental particle such as an electron. Electrons have a property called spin which when measured can have a value of either +1 or 1. A pair of electrons can be created by a simple experiment which always produces a pair of electrons with opposite spins, one spin +1 and the other spin 1. The measured
These are computers based upon quantum logic, which are roughly logics that consist of multiply superposed bits of information, known as qubits. Such computers have been built, although to date the most powerful quantum computers can only operate on a couple of quibits, so they are not very useful. Eventually quantum computers should be powerful enough to perform simultaneous parallel computations. They will be able to perform computations that are impossible on the most powerful bit-processing computer systems.
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value of an electrons spin always lines up with an applied magnetic eld so that the orientation is always +1 or 11 and never any value in between. Suppose we create two such electrons sending one to the left at near the speed of light, and the other to the right at near the speed of light. We would expect that a measurement of +1 for the left electron will guarantee with probability 1.0 that the right moving electron will be measured with spin 1. Now suppose we repeat the experiment with the right moving electron experiment magnetic eld rotated by 45 with respect to the eld used to measure the left electron. What should be the value of spin for the right electron if the left electron is found to have spin +1 again? The answer is that there is a 50/50 chance, or probability of 0.5 that the right electron spin is +1 and a 50/50 chance that it is +1. The spin cannot take any value other than 1 so the 45 rotated apparatus in a sense is confused and so results in this 50/50 probability. That is a weird result, but it has been demonstrated many times and tested many times and this is the way electrons behave. But there are many other experiment that can be done exploiting this seeming ambiguity about the spin of an electron formed by this correlated pair method. One beautiful experiment devised by the mathematician John Horton Conway and the mathematical physicist Simon Kochen uses a set of 33 directions in space where the spin of each electron is simultaneously measured in 3 perpendicular directions. Because of the way the 33 directions are chosen every measured must yield a triple of result either (1, +1, +1), or (+1, 1, +1) or (1, +1, +1), these are the allowed triples. That is two of the measurements must yield a spin of +1 and the remaining third measurement must be 1. This is a certainty according to quantum physics. Conway and Kochen prove that the spin correlations between the twin electrons is such that once the left electrons spin values in three chosen directions are determined the possible values of spin for the right moving electron cannot possibly be determined for all 33 directions. So no matter what choice of three orthogonal directions is chosen for the right electron, it will assuredly result in an allowed triple, but the particular triple that is obtained is inconsistent with the allowed triples for other choices of spin axis. A violation of this rule would violate quantum mechanics. Call this the Conway-Kochen law. To interpret this theorem, which uses only laws of physics, you have to appreciate that no signal can be sent faster than the speed of light, so there is no way for an inuence from the left electron to be sent to the right electron to tell it which way to point its spin direction along any particular three of the 33 directions. Here is the kick of this theorem. If two physicists, Alice and Bob, have enough free will to randomly choose three orthogonal directions in this experiment, then since the electrons cannot signal which three axes will be chosen until they encounter the magnetic elds, the electrons have to have a minimalist type of free will to be able to orient their spin according to the rules of quantum mechanics so the ConwayKochen law is not violated. To be more concrete, suppose the left electron is measured rst by Alice, it could be considered lazy and let its spin be arbitrarily determined yielding some allowed triple. But then for the right moving electron there is no information available for it 20

to have twinned spin opposite to its left moving twin and that satises all possible orthogonal triples that the second experimenter Bob could choose from among the 33 options. The reason the right moving electron in this experiment must have some minimal amount of free will is because there is no information in the past history of the universe that can x the values of spin that the right electron should produce on all 33 directions. So the right moving electron is free to determine the triple according to experimenter Bobs nal choice. Or, if you like, the universe conspires to make this decision. In case this has thoroughly bent your mind into a tangle, let me rephrase the entire experiment in simpler terms. Once Alices electron is measured in three orthogonal directions there is no way that any information can x the values of the right moving electrons spin along the 33 directions available for Bob to choose. So if Bobs choice is free then the right moving electron must somehow determine its own spin values (along Bobs three chosen directions). The point is that the electron must have some minimal autonomy. Alternatively, the universe in the locality of the right moving electron has this autonomy. I should say that this result of quantum physics is more than a curiosity, but it does not really impact upon the philosophical debate about human free will. If Bob does not have free will then the right moving electron does not need to be ascribed a free will. The Conway-Kochen theorem is still important for physics because it proves that the universe is incomplete. The universe does not contain enough information to determine all future events from the complete historical information available. If nothing else, this provides an element of causal freedom for non-physical reality to non-trivially eect the time evolution of the universe. It is an opening for human free will, but not quite an invitation.

Conclusions

So what does this all mean for the harmony of science and religion? Well, if we are talking about T-religion, it is dicult to imagine any conict. If you are talking about S-religion then there is plenty of conict, and usually it is S-religion that is false. Science can result in false theories and false predictions, but they tend to be self-correcting and do not survive for long. Science if thus a great lter for weeding out the more absurd religious claims. But almost by denition there cannot be a proper conict between T-religion and science. The diculty faced by humans with free will is how to decide whether a movement is a T-religion or a false system of belief. From a Bah perspective this is a a problem that cannot be resolved. It is the principle of independent investigation of truth which entails the right of all humans endowed with limited free will, to investigate and decide for themselves the claims of religion. Bah would simply a s say that if religion and science disagree then one or the other is wrong. If the science is tight then the religious claim is false. 21

This seems like a nice tidy place to end this meditation on science and religion. Bear in mind that there are many interesting questions we have not resolved, like the AI singularity, the nature of the soul, the operation of free will, and issues of how to universalize morality. Like the Chinese architects of antiquity we choose to leave some things unnished as a measure of respect for future thinkers and appropriate humbleness before the All Mighty.

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