Archimedes’ Hot Tub

In 2010, Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said in response to Hawking and his mind of God comment that

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are different intellectual enterprises. They even occupy different hemispheres of the brain. Science – linear, atomistic, analytical – is a typical left-brain activity. Religion – integrative, holistic, relational – is supremely a work of the right-brain.

In other words, science has limits to what it can say, especially about human interaction based on human values. An earnest idea in an ironic age?

Scientists Jewish, Christian and Muslim once strived to bring greater glory to God through revealing things about His world. During the Enlightenment, the idea of natural theology developed, with God as designer of the marvelous world around us. Even after Darwin and Wallace and their theory of evolution destroyed the premise of natural theology, many scientists continued to pursue knowledge of the world and our universe to enhance the glory of God. Now most science seems to get done for the glory of science. Perhaps that’s an inevitable secular shift. Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary, gives way to secular non-profits. Mission schools and hospitals yield to professionalized institutions.

Now we can seek knowledge for the glory of ourselves, or its own sake. Both are easier to know and experience than God.

“Humans have this extraordinary capacity for propositional knowledge, objective knowledge and it’s enabled us to make huge advances,” says Fraser Watts, lecturer in theology and science at Cambridge University. “Our kind of excitement about that can distract us from knowing God.”

Is the rise of the left brain, analytic, incisive, a moral hazard for morals? Watts thinks so. He thinks the left brain “is not a good way of knowing God.”

He’s also worried that the left brain is subsuming the more expressionist right brain. He says art and religion are being distorted into left brain work. “Left-brain dominance that is a threat to our society and the human race,” he says.

Apocalyptic language, applied to religion itself. What will it mean for our morals?

Something to contemplate as we sit down to Easter supper. Perhaps at some point I’ll work on a piece that answers these questions.

Alyosha, the spiritual Karamazov brother in Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel, receives the following advice:

Remember always, young man, that science has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of the world have nothing left of all that was sacred. But they have only analyzed the parts and not the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous.

Blind or not, science offers marvelous metaphors: the Big Bang, the theories of evolution and relativity. These are also things most of us cannot know – to really see them requires significant training needed to overcome the counter-intuitiveness of science. It takes real and consistent work for a scientific education to overwhelm our sense of intuition. Yet like moral ideas, scientific memes are powerful, and can offer neutral, non-judgmental ways of looking at the world around us and the people who live in it.

Wilde said, “in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

Victorian society disagreed about Wilde’s style; ours would shrug. Social stigma shifts. Things scandalous 50 years ago – psychotherapy, divorce, bankruptcy, having children outside of marriage, skipping worship – become unremarked, even civil rights.

 Does a loosening of Bible-driven conventions lead to a less judgmental, possibly more just world?

We’re getting pretty close to having built an omniscient mind of our own, or so we think. The attachment of sensors to all sorts of things, billions of people feeding data to Facebook and Google and Apple, even more billions using cell phones that track our location, creating a treasure trove of data. Some — a select few — integrate and algorithmically analyze that data for patterns. All that data analysis points towards a depth and breadth of knowledge about people that we’ve not had before. Predictive analytics is what the field is called, because the algorithms let institutions make predictions about behavior – who will buy something, where a crime might be committed. We’ve had the ability to use data to predict things for 200 years; we now have more data and better algorithms, and can predict more things.

It feels vaguely like the algorithm meisters will be able to read our diaries, to know things about us that no one is supposed to know. That feels like it violates a moral law of some type, the type C.S. Lewis starts off Mere Christianity with, “that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way.”
Statistics provide probabilities, not Truth. Predictive analytics is not predestination, the idea that God knows the course of our life before we are born. Every time we think we know it all, some cocky Nobel Laureate at Long Term Capital Management or a quant at Lehman Brothers threaten to send the world economy back into the Stone Age. Despite such malignant miscalculations, market values have begun to dislodge moral ones, writes Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard, in his 2012 book What Money Can’t Buy. “The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed,” Sandel writes. “It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.”

“We’re a figure-it-out culture,” says David B. Burrell, a priest and theologian who in 1986 published Knowing the Unknowable God. “That becomes our paradigm for knowing: to know something is to circumscribe it, to comprehend it, to get our mind around and therefore to domesticate it.”

He pauses and chuckles. “Try to figure out your spouse. You’re in big trouble!”

People of all stripes know better than to pigeonhole their spouse. Many of those people will nonetheless prefer not to accept moral values. Market values may seem objective. But people make markets. Is it a good thing to replace morals with markets?

Greeks, Romans and Egyptians appealed to gods who were very powerful and whose actions could be hard to understand, but who weren’t omniscient or omnipresent.

The monotheistic God of the Hebrews offered an upgrade. From a moral basis, an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God was the sort of God that should make one think twice before certain acts. Yet Genesis was “a soap opera,” as John R. Coats, a former Episcopalian minister, put it in his book “Original Sinners.” Noah gets roaring drunk and passes out naked; Abraham passes his wife off as his sister even though it means she’ll be sleeping with another man; Joseph’s siblings sell their bratty brother into slavery. The rest of the Torah is also pretty juicy, aside from assorted dull digressions into how people ought to be. People turn out to need a lot of reminding. Even after the Red Sea gets parted, an ass-saving miracle of epic proportions, the Hebrews freak out and shape the idolatrous Golden Calf. An outraged Moses smashes the original Ten Commandments.

Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus all think God is beyond the human capacity for understanding (Buddhists, technically godless, focus on advancing self-enlightenment). Knowing God in an object sense, knowing God’s properties, as we know those of a tree, a person, an atomic element, is not something religious seekers expect to find. The early 19^th century philosopher Hegel, a Lutheran, said “God does not offer Himself for observation.”

“The idea that humans can study God and come to know about Him is kind of preposterous from a religious point of view,” says Fraser N. Watts, who teaches theology and science at Cambridge University and is an Anglican vicar. “God is not an object, He’s a subject.”

Even referring to God by gender goes too far for Maimonides, a 12^th century rabbi who wrote, “All we understand is the fact that [God] exists…”

In Judaism, practitioners may even avoid spelling G_d. “It would imply undue familiarity,” says Harold Kushner, a Conservative rabbi  and author of bestsellers such as “Why Bad Things Happen To Good People” and “Living a Life That Matters.” Kushner says Judaism is far more concerned with the presence than the properties of God. “Can we understand God? I don’t think that’s possible. That would make us greater than God,” says Kushner. He says theologians who claim to be authorities on God commit a sin.

Kushner isn’t alone.

“It’s important to us as believers that we’re continually seeking God,” says David B. Burrell, a Catholic priest who wrote Knowing the Unknowable God back in the mid-1980s. “It’s terribly important for us believers not to pretend that we know God. If we ever think we have comprehended God, then it’s not God.”

Scientists often caution that their experimental results don’t reveal a truth, just provide evidence for an approximation of it.

Evidence for most believers comes from experience – miracles, visions, the direct response of God (or gods) to prayer, the personal experience of a higher power, or witness of another’s experience – these things build faith. A few glorious weeks of interaction with Jesus as a teenager set Mother Theresa on her way, though she never directly experienced Jesus again. Like her, many people hinge their faith on one experience that feels divine. These experiences are real, but can’t be measured, though scientists like Andrew Newberg have tried.

It’s hard to hold belief in something we cannot see or may only experience once in a lifetime. You don’t have to be a scientist to gnash your teeth at the unobservable, unknowable, random experience of God. There’s a fable here, Tolkein’s myth-that’s-true. Having an unknowable God tells us that we are not to assume we know as much as we think we do. We are to know that some things lie beyond us.

Does that make us morally better than we would be with no such concept of God?

Do scientific discoveries make known to us the properties of God?

I was asked recently to write about the moral implications of an unknowable God. I couldn’t fit the piece into my schedule, but I did do some thinking on the topic. It’s the week leading up to Easter, so I’m posting these thoughts in hope.

At first, I thought it was an odd question: for Christians, at least, and Jews, we spend our time trying to know what we can of God, rather than worrying about all the parts we can’t comprehend. There’s a poem called The Truth About God by Anne Carson, which includes these lines: My religion makes no sense/And does not help me/Therefore I pursue it.

I see these lines not as a condemnation of religion but an acknowledgement of its ability to pull us into emotional and spiritual places we don’t understand and may not think we should go. Useful is cunningly prosaic; ATMs are useful, and gas stations, but we would never pursue either. Religion we pursue because it feels like it leads us someplace meaningful, though it is beyond our ability to say why.

Scientists often pursue things that wouldn’t interest their own mothers; a great deal of basic research tells us almost nothing. Yet sometimes huge breakthroughs occur that seem to tell us a good deal about the world around us.

The brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking has talked about being able to know the mind of God. The idea would perplex most religious believers, who would wonder why such a smart guy was bothering with something everybody should know is not knowable. Nonbelievers might wonder why such a smart guy would bother at all.

Hawking probably doesn’t bother. He meant that line (in his book A Brief History of Time, first published in 1988)as metaphor. Scientists are prone to grandiose statements about some new uncovery they’ve made. The genome becomes “the secret of life.” Physicists think they’re smarter than biologists, so Hawking ups the ante, calling a unified theory of physics (one that works for both quantum and classical mechanics) “the mind of God.” The idea behind both is that as we uncover elemental parts of our selves and our world, we get closer to understanding how we came to be, and maybe why. Knowing what was, before, unknowable makes God seem smaller, if we think God needs to set things in motion. Of course, uncovering those basic laws of the universe tell us nothing about God’s mind, anymore than they say something about God’s existence.

Still, as we gain  such knowledge, does it make us gods of ourselves, individuals who can set our own rules, ‘authority’ be damned?