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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by George J. Irbe Gerald L. Schroeder is the author of The
Science of God [1],
which appeared in 1997. I value this work highly; I
have gained much knowledge from it which has helped
to solidify my own understanding of God's immanence
in all creation. I have cited many passages from
this book in several of my essays. In 2001
Schroeder published a sequel, titled The Hidden
Face of God [2].
Naturally, I was interested to read this book to
find out what additional thoughts Schroeder can
contribute to the understanding of the Creator and
his works. As it states on the back cover of the Touchstone
Book edition of his book, Schroeder "first
reconciled science and faith as different
perspectives on a single whole in The Science of
God. Now, in The Hidden Face of God,
Schroeder takes a bold step forward, to show that
science, properly understood, provides positive
reasons for faith." Indeed, Schroeder is a
scientist who endeavors to persuade the 'faithful'
to embrace not only mundane scientific realities,
but also the most far-flung hypotheses of modern
cosmology. I want to comment on the contents of The
Hidden Face of God from these perspectives: (a)
observations of intelligent design in the natural
sciences, (b) Schroeder's religious disposition,
(c) the metaphysical realm of mind or soul, also
known as the 'mind-body' problem, and (d) esoteric
cosmological theories. (a) Intelligent design in the natural
sciences Comments on this aspect of Schroeder's work will
be deservedly brief, because his presentation of
the science of life is so excellent. Gerald
Schroeder holds a Ph.D. degree from MIT with
expertise in both physics and biology. In The
Hidden Face of God he tells a truly captivating
tale about the molecular biology of a living cell,
the step-by-step making of a human being, how nerve
cells work, and the fantastic complexity of the
brain. All these marvels are presented along with
the evidence that a higher intelligence must be
involved in the creation of all the myriad life
forms which we know on earth, and in their
apparently intelligent interaction with the
environment. Schroeder likens the intelligent
behavior of living things to their having 'wisdom';
he says, "The wisdom intrinsic to the simplest
forms of life is nowhere presaged in the substrate
from which life is built" (p. 91), and, "Had Darwin
known of the wisdom hidden within life, I have
confidence that he would have proposed a very
different theory" (p. 113). Books by The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the
Ultimate Truth The Science of God: The Convergence of
Scientific and Biblical Wisdom Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of
Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible
Some of Schroeder's statements about the wonders
of life are of memorable quality, for example: All this is wonderful, exhilarating stuff for us
who believe that the Creator shows his face to us
through the intelligent design which is evident in
the make-up and functions of all life forms on
earth. The Hidden Face of God is, in this
respect, an affirmation of, and elaboration on,
what was stated in The Science of God. (b) Religious disposition Gerald L. Schroeder is a scholar of his Jewish
faith as well as a devoted scientist. He knows how
the ancient Hebrew holy books are to be interpreted
and understood. Being an authority on both his
science and his Bible has enabled Schroeder to
proffer the very convincing arguments in The
Science of God and The Hidden Face of
God that science and religion, evolution
(non-Darwinian) and what is commonly called
'creationism,' can be in large measure reconciled,
at least to the point where the two stop behaving
like mortal enemies and begin to listen to what the
other is saying. He is particularly good at
reconciling Genesis 1 of the Bible with the
currently-prevailing cosmological theory on the
formation of the universe. Like most scientists, and particularly those of
the Jewish faith, Schroeder holds his religious
convictions in a rational manner, without a trace
of the zealotry found in the ardent religious 'true
believer.' He lets this be known early on in The
Hidden Face of God, when he says: However, he also recognizes the legitimacy of
the Bible and the wisdom of its scholarly
interpreters. Schroeder hopes that science will one
day discover the long-sought-for unified theory of
forces. He hopes that there is a prophetic clue for
that happening in the translation of Genesis by
Onkelos: Schroeder is also a man of faith in the
conventional biblical sense. He believes that
ultimately our fate rests in the hands of God as
shown in the following passages: Schroeder's chief mission in all the books he
has written with this theme has been to convince
both the scientist and the Bible believer that
there is common ground on which the two can and
must perforce meet. To this end, he makes his point
in several places in The Hidden Face of
God: Like Einstein, who said: "Science without
religion is lame, religion without science is
blind," Schroeder similarly makes the argument that
each must be supportive of the other: (c) The metaphysical realm From what Schroeder has and has not stated in
his books, I surmise that his metaphysical beliefs
do not extend beyond the God of the Hebrew Bible.
Belief in an incorporeal and perhaps immortal soul
occupies a central place in my own non-religious
faith. Schroeder expresses no specific opinion
regarding the soul. This is really not surprising.
It is a given that a scientist would find it
difficult to accept, on faith alone, the existence
of an ethereal, indefinable entity called 'soul.'
Moreover, Schroeder's Judaic religion is also very
ambiguous and rather noncommittal regarding the
possibility of a soul having an afterlife. From
what I have read, it is my understanding that the
idea of an afterlife was introduced into Hebrew
religious thought from Zoroastrianism while the
Israelites were under Persian rule. Therefore, I
can understand Schroeder's (unstated) unbelief in
the soul on both scientific and religious
grounds. I, on the other hand, have an unshakeable belief
that all living things have a soul, and human
beings have the most sophisticated souls of all
living things. There is nothing outlandish about
this belief. It was also held, some 2400 years ago,
by one of the greatest thinkers in the history of
mankind -- Aristotle. His thoughts on this subject
are found in his work, called De Anima
[3],
Book III, Chapter 4. I do admire greatly the thought and logic of
Aristotle. Thus it was that, having become
accustomed to Schroeder's pleasant style of
expressing his ideas, I was shocked by his
uncharacteristically intemperate (and to my
sensibilities offensive and hurtful) statement
regarding Greek philosophy: I find it to be a sublime irony that I believe
in an incorporeal soul, the idea for which comes
from a Greek philosopher who, according to
Schroeder, was not capable of conceiving of
something that cannot be touched or seen. It is
incomprehensible to me that a physical scientist of
Schroeder's stature can derogate the great thinkers
of Western civilization who gave us the very
foundation for logic and the scientific method.
Could it be that Schroeder is utterly ignorant
about Aristotle's philosophy? Perhaps so, in which
case he would not be conscious that in saying, "We
all have an unexplainable nebulous desire to reach
for some higher purpose, for meaning, in life even
after we have satisfied the survival needs of food,
clothing, and shelter"( p. 128), he is expressing
the very theme of Aristotle's quest for
'happiness'. But to go on, it is clear that Schroeder along
with many other scientists, and like the
philosopher of science, Karl Popper, avoid straying
into the metaphysical realm by defining the
puzzling dilemma of 'the ghost in the machine' (an
euphemism for 'soul') as the 'mind-body problem.'
That Schroeder is also struggling with the
'mind-body problem' is clear from the following
passages (my remarks are in square brackets): [Note: in which case, the consciousness of
the universe being, surely, a metaphysical concept,
would make the 'nonphysical' mind the equivalent of
'soul'.] [Note: the concept of 'emergent property' is
as ethereal as the concept of 'soul'; thus, indeed,
the concept of mind/soul is as fundamental as
gravity.] [Note: the 'consciousness of the mind' is
the 'soul.] [Note: in other words, they may possibly
concede the presence of the incorporeal
soul.] [Note: there is no missing link; there is
the soul which expresses itself by using the
brain.] In the following passage Schroeder comes as
close to saying the word 'soul' as one can without
actually doing so: And in the next two passages Schroeder concedes
the presence of certain mental properties in other
animal species: I maintain that these properties actually belong
to the souls of the living creatures. Aristotle may
have come up with a rather incredible
classification of souls and their properties for
the different living things, but, as is true with
so much of our knowledge, he did spark the right
idea. It is useful to mention here how the philosopher
Karl Popper and the neurologist John Eccles dealt
with the 'mind-body problem' in their jointly
authored work, The Self and Its Brain
[4].
Popper says, in Chapter P4, section 29 : ". . . I
wish to state clearly and unambiguously that I am
convinced that selves exist," but later, in the
same Chapter, section 42, he says, ". . . there
seems to be no reason to believe in an immortal
soul, or in a psychical substance that can exist
independently of the body." One must conclude that
for Popper the 'self' exists only so long as the
brain exists. Schroeder would in all probability
subscribe to the same notion. John Eccles allows for more metaphysical
latitude to the 'mind-body problem.' He says, in
Dialogue XI, From John Eccles I inherited that most
meaningful of questions: Is it that this life of
ours is simply an episode of consciousness between
two oblivions, or is there some further
transcendent experience of which we know nothing?
My answer is that, considering that the Creator
does everything for a purpose, there would be none
in creating a conscious entity between two
oblivions. (d) The irrational exuberance of theoretical
cosmology After reading The Hidden Face of God, I
had to take exception with the statement on the
back cover of the book that ' Schroeder takes a
bold step forward, to show that science, properly
understood, provides positive reasons for faith.'
In my opinion, not all of the science presented by
Schroeder provides positive reasons for faith. Not
all of Schroeder's scientific theories are amenable
to reconciliation with metaphysical faith or
beliefs. It appears to me that, in the main, the
modern-day cosmological theories, espoused rather
ardently by Schroeder, are antithetical to common
sense, and even more so to metaphysical
beliefs. I will not argue with that part of theoretical
cosmology presented by Schroeder which talks about
the big bang, or the spontaneous 'expansion' of the
universe, or which says that ". . . we are made of
the stuff of the big bang. We were present at the
creation" (p. 180); or that "Fifteen billion years
ago all of us and all we see were part of a compact
homogeneous ball of energy" (p. 184). This part of
theoretical cosmology, which I characterize as
irrationally exuberant, does not intrude on the
reality of our every-day existence and is therefore
hardly worth the bother of a dispute. However, there are other aspects of modern
theoretical science, which I characterize as
'esoteric,' which tend to paralyze our ordinary
common understanding of reality and promote a
nihilistic vision of all existence. Here are a few
selections from The Hidden Face of God to
show what I mean by that: Call me a Neanderthal, but you will never get me
to accept as truth that our material existence is
more fiction than fact. What Schroeder and I in
actuality disagree on so strongly is our differing
views of reality. I find the concepts of Karl
Popper to be intellectually quite congenial with my
own. So I turn to Popper for help in order to
counter Gerald Schroeder's paradigm of reality. In The Self and Its Brain [4], in
Chapter 1, Section 4, Popper explains how he views
the term "real." He suggests that if an entity is
regarded as real through a process of theoretical
derivation, it is better to talk of the truth or
verisimilitude of the theory rather than of the
existence of the entity. Today we accept atoms,
electrons and other elementary particles as really
existing because of their causal effects on
photographic emulsions; the photographic emulsion
is an 'ordinary real material thing.' Thus we
conclude logically that "real" entities can be
concrete or abstract in various degrees. We accept
the forces and fields of force postulated by
physics as real because they appear to act upon
material things. Still, these postulated forces are
more abstract and conjectural than ordinary
material things. According to Popper, "they are
dispositions to interact . . . highly abstract
theoretical entities; yet as they interact in a
direct or indirect way with ordinary material
things, we accept them as real." There is an item that made news recently in
science which illustrates this argument
beautifully: The reason that the little lizards
called geckos can walk on smooth surfaces even
upside down is because a gecko has about 500,000
hairs, called setae, each about one-tenth
the diameter of a human hair, on the bottom of each
foot. Furthermore, the tip of each of the
setae is further divided into between
several hundred and 1,000 even tinier hairs called
spatulae (visible only through the electron
microscope). The lizards defy gravity by using what
is called the "van der Waals force." This force
causes molecules to cling together, like magnets.
However, it is a weak force that works only at
extremely small distances. For example, when the
gecko plants his hairy little toe on the surface of
a mirror, the extremely fine toe hair
(spatulae) get close enough to the molecules
of the mirror to establish a van der Waals force
attraction. In fact, the contact between the hairs
and the molecules of the mirror becomes so intimate
that, for a split second, the hairs are actually
"part of" the mirror. Now, as far as the gecko is concerned, he is
real, the mirror is real, his marvelously
engineered foot is real, the molecular force he
utilizes is real, and so is the fly he has just now
snagged with his tongue. And I can intellectually
grasp and accept all of the gecko's realities as
well. I am satisfied, like Popper, to accept that
material things, i.e. solid material bodies, are
real in the traditional sense, and likewise accept
with the physicists that theoretical physical
entities other than matter, such as forces, fields
of force, electrical charges, photons, etc., are
real. However, there is a reason why we
differentiate between these two kinds of realities
-- the concrete and the abstract. In Chapter 2, titled "The Worlds 1, 2, and 3,"
Popper presents a tripartite model of our
existence. He calls World 1 the universe of the
physical entities; World 2 is the world of our
mental states, including states of consciousness
and psychological dispositions and unconscious
states; there is also a World 3 which is the world
of contents of thought and the products of the
human mind. Products of the human mind include
stories, explanatory myths, tools, scientific
theories (true as well as false), scientific
problems, social institutions, and works of
art. Many World 3 objects can only be expressed in
conjunction with material objects, and thus belong
to both World 3 and World 1. These include
sculptures, paintings, books, and many other
instances where World 3 objects consisting of
words, images, or music are expressed on a material
medium belonging in World 1. It is important to
note that, first and foremost, World 3 objects are
even more abstract than physical forces, but they
are none the less real; for one, they are powerful
tools for understanding and changing World 1. But
World 3 objects have an effect on World 1 only
through their implementation and application by
their human creators who, in their turn, must use
their World 2 mental processes to do so. We can
therefore conclude that both World 3 objects and
the processes of World 2 are in a sense also real,
although their reality is unlike the traditional
concepts of material reality. I would like to conclude this commentary on
The Hidden Face of God by stating what, at
least to me, are some obvious truths, not all of
which have been enunciated by the author, Gerald
Schroeder:
References 1. Gerald L. Schroeder, The
Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and
Biblical Wisdom (Free Press, 1997). Click
HERE
for more information about this book at Amazon.com.
Return 2. Gerald L. Schroeder, The
Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate
Truth (Touchstone, 2002). Click HERE
for more information about this book at Amazon.com.
Return 3. Aristotle, De Anima.
Click HERE
for more information about Aristotle's Basic Works
at Amazon.com. Return 4. John C. Eccles and Karl R.
Popper, The Self and Its Brain (Routledge,
1977). Click HERE
for more information about this book at Amazon.com.
Return
Questions/Comments? Post them in The
Radical Academy Forum Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical
Liberal George E-mail Address: George
J. Irbe
Mundane and Esoteric Science
Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder
Enrich
your life with a book about religion...
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