The theory of evolution is her main target. It is ironic, she says, that while for many people one of the prime aims of science is to get rid of religion, evolution has many features suggesting it is itself such an entity.
Not unlike a religion, evolution makes prophecies, in particular that mankind is on an “upward escalator” as a result of which individuals of the future will be more intelligent and in other ways more complete and talented. In wide-ranging references to the works of the psychologist B. F. Skinner, the biologists Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis and E. O. Wilson, and the theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, she focuses first on genetic engineering as a way of achieving human salvation, contrasting that with “the incoherence of supposing that we understand our own nature well enough to get it right.” (She particularly contrasts the “thinness” of social scientists’ descriptions of man with those of novelists.) She looked at books such as the philosopher Jonathan Glover’s What Sort of People Should There Be? wherein, she says, DNA is considered “as a sort of film strip.”
What direction should we go in? Do we know enough? Human nature, she tells us, is not a machine to be built after a model. She notes that Skinner appeals for a technology of human behavior that will free us, make us happy and give us greater dignity, but adds that nothing like such technology is remotely available—certainly not in biology and not even in physics.
Figures like Francis Crick, she says, are always predicting—“nay, demanding”—the continued upward development of the human species. But this is not a scientific approach—science offers no mandate for it. The scientists’ faith, as she calls it, is placed in “three concentric entities—the scientific profession, the human race, and life or evolution. The direction of all three is the same. Evolution, they argue, ‘is the enterprise of the universe, into which we are born.’” This “religion” lacks a sense of reverence, awe or goodness, but retains “some sense of vastness and majesty . . . [and is] intense and evangelical.”32
THE NEW DOGMA AND THE NEW METAPHYSICS
Midgley notes that to apply the word “selfish” to the word “gene” is not a conventional use of that adjective. There has always been something unpleasant about it—indeed, to be described as selfish was and is an insult. But the new selfishness, the new “ego-charged approach to evolution,” particularly in its sociobiological or social-Darwinist context, gives an allegedly biological underpinning to crass individualism, “which manifestly goes against the tenets and experience of our own civilization.” In The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene, she says it is absurd to say we are always ruled by self-interest—if it were so, the word “selfish” would never have been invented.
The main fault of evolution, and science in general, she feels, is to keep us detached from our world picture, as if we can do nothing about the “fact” of evolution, the “fact” of the gene, the “fact” of natural selection. “The impersonality required [which this approach appears to dictate] is not total detachment, because this is impossible. It is responsible objectivity—the far more difficult task of becoming more aware of one’s own world-picture, doing all one can to correct its more obvious faults.” But in fact she thinks that social Darwinism, or Spencerism, is “the unofficial religion of the west. . . . People want a religion for this world as well. They find it in the worship of individual success. . . . Mystical reverence for such deities as progress, nature and the life-force is then invoked to explain and justify cut-throat competition.”33
She returned to the attack in Science as Salvation (1992). Here she argued that the need for salvation is universal, “urgent and drastic,” that “faith” is a kind of map, a way of organizing a vast jumble of data, which does not necessarily need a God (as in Marxism and Taoism); but “looking outwards with reverence” is part of all serious endeavors, “an unavoidable part of any serious pursuit of knowledge.” Mere intellectual predation—fact-swallowing—is not enough for effective thought. Jacques Monod is a particular target of hers. She says that he wants us to get rid of all belief in something greater than ourselves, he invites us to see the universe as something to be conquered, something beneath us. But she insists that the cult of fact is, actually, a new faith, and that big conceptual scientific schemes like the Big Bang are not really science, but metaphysics.
She returns to the certainty that the world is ordered and accessible to us—and asks: What is the implication of that? Could it be that there is someone who knows better than us? “It is better to look upon the universe as a Thou than an It.” She notes that the idea of an ordered world may be an important element in our salvation—it controls confusion and is sustaining. We trust the physical world—this is what makes knowledge possible, to assume it has an underlying order.34
Moreover, she says, scientists have made the meaninglessness of the universe into a new dogma. This has arisen from their own modes of study, culminating in a heat death, centering the meaninglessness of the creation and destruction of the universe. Dawkins, Wilson et al., she concludes, display a “remarkable faith in unknown future science.”35
GOD AND THE COSMOLOGISTS
Midgley was equally dismissive of the interventions of physicists in religion, finding their contributions less than useful. That might be true of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1976), which claimed to find significance in the parallels between relativity theory and quantum theory on the one hand, and Eastern mysticism on the other. Many particle physicists found the parallels that he highlighted questionable. Quantum theory, he said, “forces us to see the universe not as a collection of physical objects, but rather as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole. This . . . is the way in which Eastern mystics have experienced the world.” The symmetries of quarks, in their properties of spin and “upness” or “downness,” he added, recall many Eastern symmetrical diagrams (“koans”), the yin-yang motif perhaps being the best known. Critics pointed out sharply that the existence of “parallels,” as Capra called them, didn’t prove anything, that we can find parallels galore in all walks of life without that being a sign of anything fundamentally similar between them.
In 1993, Theodore Roszak published a list of no fewer than 188 titles, all released in the previous decade and a half, on the subject of God and modern cosmology. The main point of his list was to show that, with more and more being discovered about the heavens and the way the universe worked, in both infinitely large and infinitely minute ways, it was a natural area for synthesis to be attempted.
Two further ideas, despite Midgley’s general skepticism, had at least the merit of being extremely imaginative. In The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (1992), Paul Davies, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Adelaide, advanced the view that, given that modern physics has now explained how the universe began—not so much in a big bang as in a gradual separation out of time and space, an entirely natural process—there is no need of a God hypothesis for its creation. Davies’s main concern was the examination of the relationship between the laws of physics and mathematics. For him, this was and is the central mystery—and the main joy—of life: that scientific laws exist that may be encoded in mathematical formulae. These mathematical laws are “eternal,” “omnipotent,” “transcendent”—all words used about God. Davies is convinced there must be some “deep reason” for the accord between physics and mathematics; and, moreover, “It is very hard to see how abstract mathematics has any survival value. Similar comments apply to musical ability.”
Darwinian evolution has equipped us, he says, to know the world by direct perception, and in this there are clear evolutionary advantages. But there is no obvious connection between this sort of sensorial knowledge and what he calls intellectual knowledge.36
The crucial point for him is that the world is both rational and intelligible—there is a graspable logic behind physics: “existence . . .
can be compressed into a compelling and succinct form.” It is the so-far mysterious “bond” between contingency and order that leads him to think “we have no choice but to seek [an] explanation in something beyond or outside the physical world—in something metaphysical—because . . . a contingent universe cannot carry within itself an explanation for itself.” At the same time, the new mathematical science of chaos theory shows that a few simple rules can lead to chaos and then on to “self-organization,” which may be a model for how the universe developed, since it cannot have “evolved” in a true Darwinian sense, having no reproductive capacity.
Davies therefore leans toward a form of process philosophy not so different from Alfred North Whitehead’s (see chapter 15), in which “it is simpler to posit the existence of an infinite mind than to accept, as a brute fact, the existence of this contingent universe.” So, Davies concludes, “belief in God is largely a matter of taste.” However, this “postulated being who underpins the rationality of the world” bears little relation to the personal God of the familiar religions, “to the God of the Bible or the Koran.”
Davies is saying that the transcendent reality is mathematics, that the fact that mathematics and physics coincide so closely is the all-important fact in the world; and that the practice of science, and the philosophy of science, are the closest we can get to the truth and/or truths. In this sense, he says, science offers the greatest opportunity for spiritual satisfaction. “Even the most hard-nosed skeptic must surely be tempted to conclude that there [is] ‘something going on,’” that there is an “elegant and powerful unity” beneath mathematics, that the beauty of mathematics is evidence for “a genuine transcendent reality.”37
THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY
If science as a form of worship, and mathematics as a transcendent entity, seem strange, physics as a form of theology will feel even more so. But that is what is proposed by the Oxford physicist David Deutsch in his 1997 book The Fabric of Reality (incorporating the work of other scientists such as Frank Tipler, Roger Penrose, Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel).38
Deutsch’s fundamental point is that we all inhabit “parallel universes,” that there is a “multiverse” made up of many universes and that we—or copies of us—inhabit many of these universes, of which we are only intermittently and dimly aware. He bases his argument on a series of patterns thrown by light onto a screen after it has passed through a number of slits. Depending on the number of slits, some areas on the screen are now white and some dark. This pattern can be explained, he says, only if we assume that, besides the photons that we can see—that are “tangible”—there are also “shadow” photons that are dark and intangible and “interfere” with the patterns on occasion. This leads him to the idea of parallel universes—and it is a profound idea, he says, because it explains so much that is otherwise incomprehensible.
His other main theory, building on Davies, is that computation, mathematics, accords with physics—this is what makes the world comprehensible—and, moreover, and most important, it is the only form of knowledge. The increase of such computational knowledge, he says, is the purpose of life. He entertains the idea that in a universe made according to the laws of physics and patterned on mathematics, at some point in the future all of this mathematical, computational knowledge will be known, and “life will have conquered.”
Along with Frank Tipler of Tulane University in New Orleans, he looks forward to a future billions of years ahead when computational knowledge will have expanded immeasurably from where it is now. It will have reached the point where not only space travel will be familiar, but possibly time travel, too, and where we may be able to avert the final phase of our universe which, according to current knowledge, will end in a cataclysmic “big crunch.” This, roughly speaking, is what Frank Tipler explores in his book The Physics of Immortality, in which his concept of the “omega point” is fleshed out.
As the big crunch approaches and the universe contracts, more and more energy will be concentrated in less and less space-time, which will mean that “people’s minds will be running as computer programs in computers whose physical speed is increasing without limit.” By this point, billions of years ahead, with the computing power then available, experience will be determined not by elapsed time “but by the computations that are performed in that time [italics added].” “In an infinite number of computational steps there is time for an infinite number of thoughts—plenty of time for the thinkers to place themselves into any virtual-reality environment they like. . . . They will be in no hurry for subjectively they will live forever. Within one second, or one microsecond, they will have ‘all the time in the world’ to do more, experience more, create more—infinitely more—than anyone in the multiverse will ever have done before then.”
There are preparations that will have to be made, Deutsch says, but again—and the point is crucial to this theory—the physical knowledge we have today means that all this reasoning is exactly that, reasoning based on current knowledge, not speculation. We shall need to “steer” the universe to the omega point, and along the way several deadlines will need to be negotiated. One is about five billion years from now, when the sun, if left to its own devices, will become a giant red star and wipe us out. He continues—insouciantly, you might think—“We must learn to control or abandon the Sun before then.” The omega-point theory “deserves to become the prevailing theory of the future,” Deutsch says—it is only Tipler’s “quasi-religious” interpretation of that future that has prevented it from being taken more seriously.
At the omega point, Tipler insists, everything about the universe will be known; whatever and whoever exists then will, therefore, be omniscient, from which it follows they will be omnipotent and omnipresent. “And so [Tipler] claims that at the omega point limit there is an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent society of people. This society, Tipler identifies as God.”
Deutsch emphasizes that there are great differences between Tipler’s idea of God and what most religious people believe in today. The people near the omega point would be so different from us that they couldn’t communicate with us. And they couldn’t work miracles; they did not create the universe or the laws of physics, so they could never violate those laws. They would be opposed to religious faith and have no wish to be worshipped (who would do the worshipping?). Technology would be so advanced at that point, he thinks, that they could resurrect the dead. This would be possible because by then computers would be so infinitely powerful that they could create any virtual world that ever existed, including our world in which humans have evolved. All this, in an infinite system, would enable computers to improve our world materially, to become one in which people will not die. This, Tipler says, is a form of heaven.39
What people would actually do at the omega point (people very different from us, beyond what we can imagine) is a matter of informed speculation, say both Tipler and Deutsch, because the omega point is a singularity, in which the laws of physics break down. But they insist that present-day physics and mathematics support the narrative up to the omega point.
This is all very heady—in fact, way over the heads of most of us—but what Deutsch and Tipler give us, they believe, is a glimpse of an ideal world, or universe, which science is inexorably leading us to.
Does all this teach us how to live? In the immediate and near future, it tells us, an education in physics and mathematics is likely to help us understand the future better. It seeks to give us some idea of the changes that are coming our way, it gives us an idea above all of how knowledge might change—computation has no need of a God or gods—and it offers an ideal end point to history, which subjectively will last forever (a form of mathematical immortality), with the prospect of a (sort of) resurrection for, in theory, anyone who has ever lived.
It is a breathtaking vision and, needless to say, both Deutsch and Tipler have been heavily criticized (not just by Midgley) for “unwarranted speculation”
about events so far in the future as to be meaningless to most people. But they insist their theories are based on today’s real knowledge of physics and computation. Evolution has shown us that life has proliferated on earth for roughly 3.5 billion years and it has taken that time for us to become aware, for example, of the future demise of the sun. We must learn to think in such time frames.
• • •
Evolution brings us back to earth, though it was no less imaginative or controversial than the omega point when it was first conceived. But as more and more has become known (and it is one of the great episodes of intellectual heroism in the twentieth century, along with modern physics), evolution has provided us with an alternative vision and one which, moreover, has had a distinct impact on our moral views, which religions claimed as their special territory for so many centuries. Our post-Darwin, post-Nietzsche, post-Christian moral life is the subject of the next chapter.
The one puzzle that remains with evolution is why, although most scientists are so enthusiastic about it for the understanding it gives us in so many realms, few others remain convinced. Even Richard Dawkins, one of evolution’s staunchest advocates, admitted in The Blind Watchmaker that Darwinism “seems more in need of advocacy than many other similarly established truths in other branches of science. . . . Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories.” There are two reasons why evolution is in need of such advocacy, and they go to the heart of this book. They will be discussed in the conclusion.
26
“The Good Life Is the Life Spent Seeking the Good Life”
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 58