God and the Universe of Science.

This paper deals with the question of the role of God in the Universe of Science. Like Anselm, I too would like to believe that the existence and intervention of God are open to rational inquiry. Hence the paper.

Scientific advances in the last 130 years, more specifically in Evolution and Cosmology have undermined the authority of the Old Testament regarding creation of the world and of Man. Almost all Science indicates that that the world is lawlike; Science has been extremely successful in explaining and predicting almost all physical phenomena, much of biological ones, and somewhat less psychological. Most scientific evidence, however, indicates that all phenomena have natural causes and explanation.

The tightest term to indicate the lawlikeness of the universe is "supervenience". It is defined in terms of two types of facts, or phenomena, "A-facts" and "B-facts". A-facts are in essence atomic, or primitif, facts, the mass, position, and charge of particles, and the laws of chemistry, physics, mechanical and electric attraction, etc. B-facts are then the rest, the motion of planets, chemical reactions, life, organization, etc. B-facts supervene on A-facts if there is no situation in which the A-facts are identical but B-facts are not. In other words, B-facts are totally and uniquely determined by the totality of B-facts. Supervenience allows us to state such dependence without becoming tied up in the details on the dependence.

I do not want to deal with the question of the origin of the Universe (I use this word interchangeably with "World"). It is shrouded in mystery, whether it arose spontaneously from something, or whether it was created by God. Instead, I want to probe what scientific understanding allows for God in the Universe, assuming God created it along with its laws. In the latter case there are two positions, often called theism and deism. The first assumes that God created the Universe but, having done so, it does not interfere with it. It is possible that He is interested, even concerned, possibly even judge the dead. Such a God poses interesting questions which are beyond the purvey of Science. Deism, however, presupposes an interacting God, one who is selectively but actively involved in the affairs of the World. My task is to see how it is possible and what such a World would look like to us. In order to analyze this problem, I shall divide the discussions, dealing with the purely physical, the biological (i.e. relating to life), and the psychological separately.

1; Physical

Of the three domains to be discussed, the laws of Physics have been understood best. It is the overwhelming opinion of scientists that we either understand all the laws completely, or at least we can state that physical B-facts supervene on A-facts. This is in fact Newton’s and Laplace’s extreme position, if we knew the A-facts, mass, position, charge, etc., of every particle in the Universe, every other physical fact, B-facts, would be determined. In two Universes in which every A-fact is identical, all B-facts would be too. Physical B-facts strongly supervene on A-facts, provided both Universes had the same laws. This latter does not logically follow; it is possible to imagine a Universe in which the laws of mutual attractions depend not on the square of the distance between two bodies but on the cube, to give but one example. In other words, God, if He exists, had to create A-facts, the laws, and further state that these are all there is. This last one is extremely important in some strange cases. But with these provisos, it appears that B-facts supervene completely on A-facts.

That said, how could God interact with the physical Universe. I repeat that this case assumes that the Universe is physically lawlike and there are no exceptions. That is what supervenience means.

Let us imagine a simple case of a large comet on a collision course with the Earth. The simple picture would look like as shown below. To facilitate the discussion which follows, I will show 3 Universes in the identical predicament. Obviously, they look identical.

Suppose as a result of universal prayer God decides to avert the comet from crashing into the Earth in our Universe, Universe #1. What would it look like? The picture below depict this case, along with the other Universes in which He does not intervene.

The first thing to notice is that Universe #1 is now different than the other Universes. Since we had stipulated that given identical A-facts in all Universes B-facts would be identical too, Universe #1 now violates this premise. In other words, B-facts do not supervene on A-facts in all Universes. This violates the original premise. We can conclude that if supervenience holds, God cannot interfere. Period.

Of course, it is possible that supervenience does not hold, or that it is too strong a term. What would a Universe look like if there are still laws which God honors, but maybe not total supervenience? I am not sure if this is not a contradiction, but let us proceed anyway. Even without supervenience, Universe #1, hereinafter referred to as Universe or World, would not be lawlike anymore; there would be at least one case that could not be explained by Science. Such a case has not been observed. Of course, God may not simply make a step change in the laws of Nature, but act within it, as has been said. What would it look like? He could move a small celestial body, previously unobserved by the scientists watching, in position such that the collision is averted. This, for a moment, seems to obviate the problem, but not for long. After all, we could alter all discussion, stipulate other scientists observing and depict the celestial body as we have done with the Earth and the comet; clearly that picture would show that the laws have been violated So we have not improved the situation, merely displaced it. It is possible to run the string further and suggest that God arranges and ever-increasing number of bodies to accomplish the miracle (which, by the way would no longer look like a miracle to us) Still, a superscientist, watching a screen akin to those used by flight controllers, on which the simultaneous position of all particles of the Universe are depicted, would instantly notice that the laws of Nature have been violated. This sleight of hand simply would not work without being noticed.

It is, of course, possible for God to carry the process to the beginning of the Universe and, instead of changing the laws setting the initial conditions such that the original calamity is averted.

Alas, this too is not without some philosophical, and maybe even scientific, problems.

The first one is the question of the legitimacy of changing the initial conditions. Is it more permissible or less a violation of the broad laws of Nature than altering, say, gravity? This question is more scientific. The second group, though actually quite scientific, is more familiar to philosophers, it contains the traditional problem of time, cause and effect, and determinism.

I believe that if we can solve the latter group, the former automatically becomes solved. Provisionally, however, changing the initial conditions would not amount to interfering with the laws of Nature; no scientist observing the Universe would notice it, although some scientists, like Hawking, believe that the initial conditions are not independent of the laws but are contained within them. According to that view, God would not even have the freedom to alter the initial conditions. This question, however, is still open. In my personal opinion, such an action by God is totally out of character, so to speak. Aside from the fact that to avoid one catastrophe, say 8 billion years hence (or even simultaneously) would require an unimaginably complicated set of actions, effecting many miracles would require infinitely many similar calculations. How one, even God, would set initial conditions, by definition a few number, like density, mass, charge, Big Bang velocity, such that 8 billion years hence the required miracles occur is beyond imagination. But the strongest evidence against such "interference" is the very simplicity of the "design" itself, quite the contrary of what an interventionist Universe would look like; an extremely few number of basic laws, maybe a single one, but certainly a very few, like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, a few elementary properties, like mass, charge, momentum and possibly a few more facts suffice. It sets in motion all we see today; even Darwinian Evolution requires, alas perhaps, no extra design elements. Such a Universe is the exact opposite of what would be needed to fix all miraculous interference at the onset.

This itself is no disproof, in fact it can be considered as an Argument from

Non-design, though any person would have to be struck by the beauty and simplicity of it. Still, it is possible, though with a vanishingly low probability.

A second possibility, still in accord with current scientific understanding is to eliminate the time element. While it is utterly against common sense, it is likely that there is no independent time according to Relativity only a block Universe in which the 3 spatial dimensions and time are interchangeable. If so, there is no before, after, no cause preceding effect. If such is indeed the case, God need not act a priori, but arrange everything in real time. In my view, it would still require all the complication I have mentioned, so it would not be a "real improvement".

The concept of Quantum Time and Multiverse.,

This section is to be completed.

2: Life

This area is somewhat more open to interference by God without trespassing the laws of nature, although the area of possibility is shrinking. Until the late 19th century, life was held to be qualitatively different from the realm of Physics. Darwin’s theory of Evolution, random mutation coupled with natural selection, has eroded this view, showing that the evolution, not the creation of, life does not require a different agency. Advances in properly gauging the age of the Earth, more recent breakthroughs in genetics, and finally cracking the structure of DNA and subsequently the genetic code further demonstrated the essential correctness of Darwin; certainly neo-Darwinism is essentially a branch, albeit remote, of Physics. Still, it is not all that easy to demonstrate that life supervenes on the A-facts. It is in this area, more specifically in the area of seemingly miraculous recoveries from terminal illness, which holds the highest hope for God’s miraculous intervention without violating science.

The situation is not easy to untangle. Certainly, no materialistic scientist would claim that we know exactly how life processes depend on the A-facts, though they would be able to sketch the outlines. Furthermore, they would certainly subscribe to the notion that life process supervene on the A-facts. Believers often use the miraculous recoveries of the proof to the contrary.

Compared to describing the physics of a comet traveling unimpeded toward a celestial body, charting its course, and making predictions about its crash, predicting to course of an illness is vastly more complicated. Thus, saying that a recovery was miraculous despite the diagnosis of the best doctors may say more about the state of medical diagnosis than about miracles. The body is a vastly complex mechanism with such complexity that an absolutely accurate description of the course of an illness is impossible. While one cannot rule out benevolent Divine intervention in such recoveries, it must be pointed out that these are by far the minority of the cases, even if true. It is also difficult to ignore the number of equally unexpected--miraculous is not used for these--cases in which conditions turn to the worse and death results. Of course, one could consider these as Divine intervention, as Thornton Wilder has done in his book, The Bridge of San Louis Re. For me, the argument against miracles in the case of seemingly miraculous recoveries is that these always occur in those cases which really don’t require miracles. How much more miraculous would be if an amputee sprouted a new limb! It is difficult to believe that miracles are restricted for the non-miraculous, and not for these. None of this is an absolute disproof of miraculous recovery, but a case for selective memory by the survivor and his or her family certainly is an even more plausible alternative. If one stipulates supervenience, in the absence of truly miraculous recoveries do not constitute a disproof. In fact, it is not clear to me how God could intervene without violating His laws, except if we believe that they do not apply. If we believe in supervenience, the case becomes identical to those discussed in the above section. However, supervenience is not as firmly demonstrated in this section. In fact, it may never be quite possible, since totally controlled experiments are near impossible.

David Chalmers, in his book Conscious Mind, provides a seemingly incontrovertible proof that qualia do not supervene on A-facts. This would allow for some Divine intervention.

Still, Divine intervention is more possible here, especially if it takes advantage of the effect of the mental on the biological.