Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but was to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and to find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?
Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the “God beyond God.” The best theology is a spiritual exercise akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and that cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Richard Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate—when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection. . . .
God Is Not Dead. He Was Never Alive in the First Place.
by Richard Dawkins
Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William Paley, in “Natural Theology,” that the creation of life was God’s greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we’d amend the statement: evolution is the universe’s greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent to me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town. . . .
But what if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe? What if there are life-forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods? Wouldn’t we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone, or Google Earth? But, however godlike the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable—and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics. . . .
Darwinian evolution is the only process we know of that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet, and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other “cranes” (Daniel Dennett’s term, which he opposes to “skyhooks”) that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.
Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship, or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: “Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a nineteenth-century preoccupation! It doesn’t matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism.”
Well, if that’s what floats your canoe, you’ll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or a mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.
Science Requires That You Step Outside the Mental Cocoon
an interview with George Johnson
Dan Brown opens The Lost Symbol with a note stating that “All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.” Yet how real is the science? Can readers take what Brown presents in this novel as “fact”?
To address this issue, we turned to George Johnson, the well-known science writer for the New York Times and a cohost of Science Saturday on www.bloggingheads.tv. His book credits include The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, about the people behind great scientific moments; Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order; and Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. Johnson’s depth of knowledge about science, the connection between science and faith, and the foundation of conspiracy theory puts him in a rare position to comment on how true Dan Brown has been to these themes in The Lost Symbol.
The Lost Symbol regularly associates the Freemasons with “esoteric traditions” and the use of symbols that go back to the Rosicrucians, but avoids the links “the brethren” may or may not have had to various conspiracies—the Illuminati, for example—that have run parallel to their history. Does this seem strange to you?
Freemasons have long entertained the legend that their organization is descended from ancient guilds of stonecutters—who built everything from the Egyptian pyramids to the castles of medieval Europe—and that these brotherhoods were in possession of some kind of esoteric knowledge. Maybe the original masons were just protecting trade secrets, like how to hold a chisel, but the nature of their wisdom has been subject to all kinds of wild speculation. The Freemasons themselves invite this with rituals that suggest an appreciation for other ancient societies like the Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar. But the pageantry alone doesn’t mean that the connections are real.
In the eighteenth century, the secrets protected in the Freemasonic lodges resembled what came to be called secular humanism—the notion that truths are discovered by the free human mind, not imposed top down by some ecclesiastical authority. Freemasons and similar underground societies like the Bavarian Illuminati believed that skepticism is noble, not heretical. That things happen for a reason, not by supernatural fiat. These are the ideals of the Enlightenment. No wonder Jefferson and Franklin were attracted to the cause.
For the established order, secularism was as threatening as the challenges posed earlier in history by heretics like the Gnostics and the Cathars. Through a weird kind of symbiosis, the maverick, freethinking spirit of the Freemasons interacted with the paranoid fears of the established order to give rise to a fantasy of an ancient, enduring struggle between light and darkness. It’s a theme that runs deep in the human psyche. It resonates with our brains. And it helps sell novels.
The presumed connection between the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians seems to be especially rich source material for conspiracy theorists.
The legend began in the seventeenth century when manifestos appeared in Europe claiming to be written by a secret society of mystics a
nd philosophers called the Order of the Rose Cross. These Rosicrucian documents may have been a hoax, but some historians think they were an inspiration for the founding of the Invisible College, a precursor to the Royal Society of London—which became Europe’s preeminent organization devoted to scientific research. The Freemasons also incorporated the Rosicrucians into their legends and rituals—there is a Masonic degree called “Knight of the Rose Croix.” But again, that doesn’t mean there was an actual link between the two groups—other than in the minds of the Masons and the conspiracy theorists.
You have written about the “safe houses” that gave shelter “to gentlemen [Freemasons] interested in new ideas.” These ideas represented “the thin line then between hard-core science and what we now dismiss as the occult.” It seems that Dan Brown wants to blur that line or even make it disappear. What do you make of this?
That is the most fascinating thing about this whole subject. In the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries, the line between what is and is not accepted as science was not so cleanly drawn. Scientists like Michael Faraday were showing that a current flowing through a wire could make a compass needle move. Wrap an iron nail with wire and connect one end to a piece of copper and the other to a piece of zinc, submerge both metals in a mildly acidic solution, and the nail becomes a magnet. Hold two of these coils near each other but not touching and one will influence the other through invisible waves. What could seem more magical? Later William Crookes used electricity to generate mysterious rays in a vacuum tube. He thought he was seeing ectoplasm. He and other physicists of the time dabbled in séances and spiritualism. But the scientific method slowly weeded out sense from nonsense. However, the nonsense never goes away, as evidenced by The Lost Symbol.
Nor does the sense of suspicion surrounding the Freemasons, even in a novel that treats them so reverently. Toward the end of the book, Brown suggests that the release of a video showing prominent lawmakers in a Masonic ritual would have cataclysmic effects on democracy. Do you think this would truly be the case?
It’s really pretty funny that the director of the CIA’s Office of Security is illegally detaining innocent people and threatening them with guns just to prevent a video from leaking out showing some senators and other high-level government officials playacting at the local Masonic lodge. In real life, Sarah Palin would probably take the revelations as evidence of devil worship, and right-wing radio talk-show hosts would go nuts. But a threat to democracy? Probably not.
The other major notion is that the secrets Katherine Solomon is nearly ready to reveal via her “noetic science” experiments will change the world. What is your perspective on “noetic science”?
Early in the book (chapter 18), Katherine makes what is intended as a dramatic pronouncement: “What if I told you that a thought is an actual thing, a measurable entity, with a measurable mass?” Well, what if she did? Thoughts are patterns of electrochemical pulses in the brain. They are made from matter: ions and molecules. Of course they have mass. And of course a thought can change the world. You can invent the atomic bomb, declare war on Iraq, or just decide on a whim to pick up a rock and throw it through a window.
Noetics, at least as described in the novel, is making a more radical claim: that the mind is somehow separate from the brain—philosophers call this “substance dualism”—and has powers that transcend the forces known to physics. If you concentrate really hard, your thoughts alone can move matter. That made for a great plot in Stephen King’s Carrie. But the phenomenon—telekinesis—isn’t real and doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. We never learn much in the novel about Katherine’s experiments. But they can’t have gotten very far or she could have wished her way out of the clutches of the scary illustrated man.
The Lost Symbol is fiction, so the author can make up anything he wants. But at the beginning of the book he writes, “All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.” When it comes to the science, he breaks that pact with the reader again and again. We’re told that it has been “categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, [has] the ability to affect and change physical mass” (chapter 15). Brown is actually claiming that psychokinesis is established science. In a typical experiment, human subjects are asked to concentrate very hard and try to influence the output of some sequence of random events—like trying to make a coin come up heads more often than tails. Order from chaos! But in one experiment after another, any deviations from the norm have been so slight that only people already predisposed to believe in psychic powers are impressed. Even if the deviations from randomness are more than just experimental noise, it is impossible to rule out other, more mundane explanations. Pure randomness is very hard to generate. The coin or the dice might be uneven. An electronic random-number machine may be biased in subtle ways.
Brown also exaggerates the progress superstring theory has made toward becoming established science. He says the idea that the universe has ten dimensions is “based on the most recent scientific observations” (chapter 15). But it’s not. It is a fascinating theory and an impressive feat of mathematics, but it is purely speculative and in something of a crisis because it cannot be experimentally tested. Elsewhere in the book, we’re credulously informed that a New Age superstition called Harmonic Convergence is a subject of serious consideration by cosmologists (chapter 111), and that a phenomenon in physics called quantum entanglement was presaged in shamanic texts and has something to do with remote healing.
In a typical conspiracy theory, scraps of historical truth—there was an organization in Bavaria called the Illuminati and they did interact to some extent with French Freemasons—are ripped from their context and woven into fantasies. This is how Brown treats science. It is true, as he writes (chapter 78), that the CIA funded experiments in “remote viewing.” What he doesn’t say is that the experiments were failures. It’s true that neuroscientists have scanned the brains of yogis to see what parts of the cortex light up. But they did not find that meditating brains “create a waxlike substance from the pineal gland [that] has an incredible healing effect” (chapter 133). “This is real science, Robert,” Katherine says. In truth, it’s not even good science fiction.
Again this is just a novel. But a lot of readers are going to come away from it with their scientific literacy knocked down another notch.
Brown even suggests that the connection between science and spirituality had an impact on the Founding Fathers, using Benjamin Franklin as an example. Did the belief in this connection really influence the political thought of the time?
In a word: no. Franklin wasn’t particularly religious or spiritual. He was a rationalist and was inspired like other leaders of the American cause by Enlightenment philosophers—Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu. They weren’t talking about finding links between science and mysticism, but about the ideals of democracy and the rights of man, about how to balance power and construct sturdy governments.
The subtitle for your book, Fire in the Mind, is Science, Faith, and the Search for Order. This seems to speak directly to the themes Dan Brown is playing with in The Lost Symbol. Can you expand on this a bit as it might apply to the novel?
Science, theology, and even conspiracy theories are driven by the same phenomenon: the brain’s compulsion to find order—or to impose it when it is not actually there. A major theme of Fire in the Mind is the human dilemma posed by never knowing for sure whether the orders we see are real or invented. Science is far better than religion at making the distinction. A theology or a conspiracy theory is taken as “correct” as long as it is internally consistent. Science requires that you step outside the mental cocoon and subject each idea to a reality test—a scientific experiment.
A very good point. However, while one could easily argue that “noetic science” has failed to prove anything with the “evidence” it offers, one of the things TLS suggests is that scientific proof of the existence o
f the soul and the power of mind over matter would dramatically alter life as we know it. How true do you think this is?
If, after all the failures and embarrassments of parapsychology research, psychic powers are ever demonstrated to exist, that would certainly shake the foundations of science. Mind might turn out to be something more than patterned energy and matter. The “ghost in the machine” would be real. Once they had absorbed the shock, scientists would be more excited than anyone else. They would have new territories to explore.
—Interviewed by Lou Aronica
Chapter Six
Ye Are New Age Gods
The Energy That Connects the Universe
an interview with Lynne McTaggart
Katherine Solomon turns out to be more than a fictional character. In fact, she’s an amalgam of several very real people. To create Katherine, Dan Brown drew perhaps most strongly on the accomplishments of author Lynne McTaggart. Her book The Field chronicled the efforts of a number of frontier scientists to prove the existence of an energy field that connects everything in the universe. In 2007 she published The Intention Experiment, which tells of her work with scientists to explore the power of thought. This research bears a strong similarity to the work Katherine Solomon is doing. “What if group thought could heal a remote target?” Lynne wrote in a recent blog on The Huffington Post. “It is a little like asking, what if a thought could heal the world? It is an outlandish question, but the most important part of scientific investigation is just the simple willingness to ask the question.”
Secrets of The Lost Symbol Page 20