Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (16 page)

On this approach we could think of the
nature
of a system as dictating that collapses occur at the regular rate they in fact display. What is presently of significance, however, is that on these approaches there is no cause for a given collapse to go to the particular value (the particular position, for example) or eigenstate to which in fact it goes. That is, there is no
physical
cause; there is nothing in the previous physical state of the world that causes a given collapse to go to the particular eigenstate to which it
does
go. But of course this state of affairs might very well have a
non
physical cause. It’s wholly in accord with these theories that, for any collapse and the resulting eigenstate, it is
God
who causes
that
state to result. Perhaps, then, all collapse-outcomes (as we might call them) are caused by God.
³⁹
If so, then between collapses, a system evolves according to the Shrödinger equation; but when a collapse occurs, it is divine agency that causes the specific collapse-outcome that ensues. On this view of God’s special action—call it “divine collapse-causation” (“DCC”)—God is
always
acting specially, that is, always acting in ways that go beyond creation and conservation, thus obviating the problem alleged to lie in his sometimes treating the world in hands-off fashion but other times in a hands-on way.

Furthermore, if, as one assumes, the macroscopic physical world supervenes on the microscopic, God could thus control what happens at the macroscopic level by causing the right microscopic collapse-outcomes. In this way God can exercise providential guidance over cosmic history; he might in this way guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends. In this way he might also guide human history. He could do this without in any way “violating” the created natures of the things he has created. For on
this suggestion, it is in the nature of physical systems to evolve between collapses according to the Shrödinger equation; it also is in their nature to undergo periodic collapses; but it is not part of their nature to collapse to any particular eigenstate. Hence, in causing a nature to collapse to a particular eigenstate, God need not constrain it against its nature. From the point of view of the objections to intervention, the beauty of DCC is three-fold: first, God is always and constantly engaging in special action; second, DCC shows how God can seamlessly integrate the regularity and predictability in our world necessary for free action with the occasional miraculous event; and third, it shows how all this can happen without any divine “violation” or interruption of the created order. Hence it eludes those objections to intervention.

Another objection: “Isn’t it part of the very nature of such a system to collapse in such a way as not to violate the probabilities assigned by Born’s Rule? And wouldn’t God’s causing the collapses in fact violate those probabilities? Wouldn’t there have to be something like a divine statistical footprint, if God caused those collapses?” This objection rests on false assumptions. Consider the collapses that occur at a given time or during a given period—one second, let’s say. Each collapse will be to a specific eigenstate of some observable; call the conjunction of all those specific eigenstates a “superconfiguration.” Any particular superconfiguration for a given moment or period will presumably be monumentally improbable. Now the objector seems to think we can somehow see or know, if only vaguely, that if God causes the collapses, the probabilistic pattern of the superconfigurations would be detectably different from the actual pattern of those superconfigurations. But why think so? Specifying any particular superconfiguration would be a bit beyond our powers (impressive though they be); the same goes in spades for specifying probabilistic patterns of superconfigurations; and the same goes for determining how these would or wouldn’t be different if the collapses were divinely caused. Look at it from this angle: suppose God
has
in fact caused all the collapses; how could one
argue that some probabilistic pattern of superconfigurations must be different from what it otherwise would have been?
⁴⁰

But what about miracles? What about the parting of the Red Sea, changing water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead? Most crucially, what about the resurrection of Jesus? Miracles are a mixed lot: some are unproblematically compatible with QM, but, as we saw above, about others (changing water into wine, for example) the experts disagree. However, even if all the usual suspects are in fact compatible with QM in the sense that their occurrence is not flatly inconsistent with the latter, there is another way in which some could be incompatible with it. Perhaps some of the suggested miracles, while not flatly excluded by QM, are so improbable (given QM) that they wouldn’t be expected to occur in a period 10
¹⁰
times the age of the universe. Such a miracle, if it were to occur (and if we were to think of QM as universally applicable), would
disconfirm
QM; it would be evidence against QM, and in that sense would be incompatible with it.

Of course it is far from obvious that miracles
are
incompatible with QM in either of these ways; finding a problem with them out of deference to QM seems premature, if not wholly quixotic. Still, suppose certain miracles are incompatible with QM in one or another of these ways. Would that produce a problem for supposing that those miracles have actually occurred? I think not. Of course we can’t think about natural laws as we did with respect to the “old picture.” There we followed John Mackie in the supposition that natural laws describe the material universe as it behaves when it is causally closed; on DCC, however, God is constantly acting specially in the world and the material universe is never causally closed. Therefore we must content ourselves with something vaguer. On those occasions where God’s
action results in states of affairs incompatible with QM in either of the above two ways, God is treating his world differently from the way in which he ordinarily treats it; but the laws of nature, including QM, should be thought of as descriptions of the material universe when God is not treating what he has made in a special way. Here (as often) it’s not at all easy to say just what constitutes a
special
way of treating the world, but we do have an intuitive sense for the idea.

Objection: “But doesn’t this result in divine determinism, perhaps even occasionalism, in that God really causes whatever happens at the macro-level?” Here still another virtue of DCC comes into view. Just as it could be that God causes collapse-outcomes and does so freely, so it could be that we human beings, dualistically conceived, do the same thing. Suppose human beings, as the vast bulk of the Christian tradition has supposed, resemble God in being immaterial souls or selves, immaterial substances—with this difference: in their case but not in his, selves intimately connected with a particular physical body.
⁴¹
Suppose, further, God has endowed human selves (and perhaps other agents as well) with the power to act freely, freely cause events in the physical world. In the case of human beings, this power could be the power to cause events in their brains and hence in their bodies, thus enabling them to act freely in the world. And suppose, still further, the specific proximate events human beings can cause are quantum collapse-outcomes. The thought would be that
God’s action constitutes a theater or setting for free actions on the part of human beings and other persons—principalities, powers, angels, Satan and his minions, whatever. God sets the stage for such free action by causing a world of regularity and predictability; but he causes only some of the collapse-outcomes, leaving it to free persons to cause the rest.
⁴²
If so, our action in the world (though of course vastly smaller in scope) resembles divine action in the world; this would be still another locus of the
imago dei
. Here we see a pleasing unity of divine and human free action, as well as a more specific suggestion as to what mechanism these actions actually involve.

Of course questions remain. DCC is tied to a particular version of QM; what happens if that version gets jettisoned? Indeed, what happens if QM itself gets jettisoned or seriously revised? After all, there is deep conflict between QM and general relativity; who knows what will happen here? First: if Christian belief is true, the warrant for belief in special divine action doesn’t come from quantum mechanics or current science or indeed any science at all; these beliefs have their own independent source of warrant.
⁴³
That means that in case of conflict between Christian belief and current science, it isn’t automatically current science that has more warrant or positive epistemic status; perhaps the warrant enjoyed by Christian belief is greater than that enjoyed by the conflicting scientific belief. Of course there could be defeaters for these Christian beliefs; but as we’ve seen, current science (at least as far as we’ve explored the matter) provides no such defeaters, and the theological objections proposed seem weak
in excelsis
.

What we should think of special divine action, therefore, doesn’t depend on QM or versions thereof, or on current science more generally. Indeed, what we should think of current science can quite properly depend, in part, on theology. For example, science has not spoken with a single voice about the question whether the universe has a beginning: first the idea was that it did, but then the steady state theory triumphed, but then big bang cosmology achieved ascendancy, but now there are straws in the wind suggesting a reversion to the thought that the universe is without a beginning. The sensible religious believer is not obliged to trim her sails to the current scientific breeze on this topic, revising her belief on the topic every time science changes its mind; if the most satisfactory Christian (or theistic) theology endorses the idea that the universe did indeed have a beginning, the believer has a perfect right to accept that thought. Something similar goes for the Christian believer and special divine action.

But where Christian or theistic belief and current science can fit nicely together, as with DCC, so much the better; and if one of the current versions of QM fits better with such belief than the others, that’s a perfectly proper reason to accept that version. True, this version may not win out in the long run (and the same goes for QM itself); so the acceptance in question (as of QM itself) must be provisional. Who knows what the future will bring? But we can say at least the following: at
this
point, given
this
evidence, this is how things look. And that’s as much as can be said for any scientific theory.

What we’ve seen is that there is nothing in science, under either the old or the new picture, that conflicts with or even calls into question
special divine action, including miracles. By way of conclusion, I’d like to mention a couple of other allegations of conflict between science and religion—I don’t have the space to do them justice, but I can at least say how my reply to them might go. Some people claim that science, taken as a whole, somehow supports or underwrites a naturalistic view of the universe, one in which there is no such person as God or any other supernatural beings. Indeed, this way of looking at the world is sometimes called the scientific worldview, or, following Peter Unger, “scientiphicalism.”
⁴⁴
But calling your view “scientific” doesn’t make it so, anymore than naming your son “Jack Armstrong” guarantees that he will have mighty biceps. And how is science supposed to support naturalism? Neither quantum mechanics nor general relativity has any connection with naturalism, and, as we saw in the first couple of chapters, the same goes for evolution. So where, in science, is this support supposed to come from? In addition, the fact is there is deep conflict between science and naturalism, as I’ll argue in
chapter 10
.

A second suggestion may be thought of as a special case of the first. John Worrall claims that there is a deep difference between religion and science—one that does not redound to the credit of religion.
⁴⁵
According to Worrall, there is a profound contrast between what we might call the
epistemic styles
of religion and science. The scientist, says Worrall, holds her beliefs tentatively, dispassionately, only on the basis of evidence, and is always looking for a better hypothesis, one that is better supported by the evidence. The religious believer, on the other hand, typically holds his beliefs dogmatically: he is unwilling to consider the evidence and often holds his beliefs with a
degree of firmness out of proportion to their support by the evidence; he is unwilling to look for a better hypothesis.

Of course it is well known that the way scientists hold their beliefs is often anything but tentative and dispassionate. For example, here is Werner Heisenberg on a discussion between Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger:

Bohr, who was otherwise most considerate and amiable in his dealings with people, now appeared to me almost as an unrelenting fanatic, who was not prepared to make a single concession to his discussion partner…. It will hardly be possible to convey the intensity of passion with which the discussions were concluded on both sides, or the deep-rooted convictions which one could perceive equally with Bohr and with Schrödinger in every spoken sentence.
⁴⁶

Not exactly tentative and dispassionate. As is also well-known, scientists sometimes hang on to their scientific hypotheses in the teeth of the evidence. As a matter of fact, that may be a good thing, since it improves the chances of the theory’s getting a good run for its money; and indeed sometimes the initial evidence is against a good theory.

For the moment, however, suppose there is the difference Worrall says there is. That difference indicates a science/religion conflict only if
science
tells us that beliefs in all the areas of our epistemic life ought to be formed and held in the same way as scientific beliefs typically are.
⁴⁷
But of course that isn’t a scientific claim at all; it is
rather a normative epistemological claim, and a quixotic one at that. There are all sorts of beliefs we don’t accept on the basis of evidence and don’t accept tentatively; and in all sorts of cases we do not constantly look for better alternatives. We don’t accept elementary mathematical and logical beliefs in that way, or beliefs of the sort
it seems to me I see something red
, or
I am not the only thing that exists
, or
my cognitive faculties are reliable
, or such beliefs as
there has been a past, there are other persons
, and
there is an external world
; and all this is, epistemically speaking, perfectly proper. It is
scientific hypotheses
which (for the most part) ought to be accepted in the way Worrall celebrates; but of course not nearly all of our beliefs are scientific hypotheses. In particular, religious beliefs are not. Maybe a few people accept religious beliefs strictly on the basis of what they take the evidence to be; perhaps, for example, this was true of Anthony Flew.
⁴⁸
But for most of us, our religious beliefs are not like scientific hypotheses; and we are none the worse, epistemically speaking, for that. According to Paul Feyerabend, “Scientists are not content with running their own playpens in accordance with what they regard as the rules of the scientific method; they want to universalize those rules, they want them to become part of society at large.”
⁴⁹
As applied to scientists generally, this is certainly overblown; but it does seem to apply to some science enthusiasts.