The God of the Gaps

Today, with all our technological and scientific knowledge, have we finally managed to lay the myth of God in the ground? Many aeons ago when man finally emerged as a fully developed conscious being called Homo Sapiens, at some point he developed or found religion. In fact some studies show that the Neanderthals, a separate species (some say subspecies) to Homo Sapiens also developed religion as evidenced by their burial rituals. The Neanderthals died out leaving mankind to shape the future. Whatever the case may actually be, religion developed incredibly early in the evolution of Homo Sapiens.

Everything was religious to him. There were gods everywhere. Gods of the wind, the trees, the sun, the moon. You name it, there was a god for it. As man emerged, he understand practically nothing of his environment. So somehow the idea of gods who controlled the elements came about. And this was thousands of years before the bible was even written. Modern humans evolved around fifty thousand years ago while the bible was probably written only about three and a half thousand years ago.

And even when the earliest books of the bible were being composed we can see that man still attributed everything to God. As the shift from polytheism to monotheism took a lot of time, even early biblical tales include more than one god. The first commandant, which talks about God being the Lord and God of all and you must not put other gods before him, implies that people believed in other gods which were inferior to their God. Even today the belief in angels and saints implies lesser gods.

It wasn’t till the 16th century that modern experimental science began to develop. Before then many philosophers like Aristotle, Plato or Socrates made logical assumptions with no basis in fact. For example Aristotle said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, a statement repudiated when Galileo performed his famous experiments. Aristotle and company did not use empirical evidence. Science changed all that by demanding that experiments be done and only on the outcome of the experiment could theories be developed. Even then it took some considerable time for the scientific method we know today to develop. Astrology was believed in by many scientists and much science was really a mixture of magic and experiment. Giordano Bruno, one of the men credited with the realisation that the Sun rather than the Earth was at the centre of our solar system, was basically a black magician.

However, by the time of the 18th century and the “Age of Enlightenment” science was well on the way to hard-nosed experiment which had been spear headed by such luminaries as Newton, Descartes, Pascal and Leibnitz during the 17th century. The majority of these scientists, it should be pointed out, were deeply religious people and they considered their science only confirmed their beliefs. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries where more and more scientists began questioning these religious ideas that religion began to take second place to science and belief in a deity began to decrease.

It could be argued that Charles Darwin was the main instigator in the withdrawal of science from religion. He began to question the historicity of the bible, especially after his return from the famous voyage of the Beagle where he had studied the natural history of the places he visited and collected many specimens. However, his theory of evolution for the first time seriously questioned the whole idea of man being created directly by God. Instead he had evolved from lower mammals. A great mainstay in the whole theology of God had been shown to rest on shifting sand.

Now things changed and as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced that “God was Dead”, those who would not let God die were being forced back into a smaller corner. Of course they didn’t just lie down and give up. In Tennessee a law was enacted making it illegal to teach the theory of evolution. This was in 1925. John Scopes, a teacher, was brought to trial for disobeying this law and was found guilty but got off on a technicality.

And even further back, in 1860, a debate took place at the Oxford University Museum on the theory of evolution. While a number of prominent scientists and philosophers took part it is best remembered for some remarks which in all probability were never uttered, but it’s a good story and sums up the mood. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce spoke against evolution and asked Thomas Huxley who argued in defense of evolution whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he considered himself descended from a monkey. Huxley retorted that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.

Even today, the argument rumbles on with Creationism and Intelligent Design as two theories purporting to prove that God created man exactly as it says in the bible. I actually heard to my astonishment a Creationist scientist on a television program some time ago stating while science can prove or disprove certain things, once it disagreed with the bible, then the bible won hands down. At this point the mind boggles.

However, many theists today are happy to accept that evolution is the way God progressed his creation. Also most people no longer believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, so now we can go back to the beginning of the universe itself. In the first half of the last century two theories held sway, the Big Bang which said that the universe exploded into existence about 13 or so billion years ago while the Steady State said that the universe had always existed. Unfortunately for the latter theory, in 1964 the faint echo of the Big Bang was detected. Even Pope Pius XII celebrated this fact as it gave credence to the possibility that God perhaps lit the touch paper.

Is this the last gap that God can inhabit today? Unfortunately not. He has been squeezed out of that position as well. It used to be thought that for every effect there had to be a cause. What caused the Big Bang? Well, obviously it had to be God, hadn’t it? Well, not really because you can go on to ask what caused God. So what is more logical, the big bang somehow caused itself, or God caused himself. Or slightly differently, the big bang came out of a previous universe which had its own big bang with these cosmic events going back infinitely in time. So again with a hint of the steady state theory raising its head, the universe was always there. Or God was always there. Why take that extra step? We don’t need God to explain it.

But if that’s the case why do we find that the constants in the universe like the ratio of an electron to a proton, the strength of gravity, the strength of the other forces like electromagnetism, are so finely tuned. If any of these constants or forces were slightly different we could not exist. The universe would be empty. In fact, the universe as we know it could not exist. Doesn’t this look like some sort of designer at work?

No, because what we like to call the multiverse today, that is, universe following universe infinitely back in time will each have had their forces set up in different ways totally at random. It just happens that finally we get an universe which has just the right ingredients to allow the existence of us. The laws of probability; it just had to happen at some point.

So at last God has nowhere left to hide. There are no more gaps left to fill which He might squeeze into. He’s gone. We’ve dealt him a mortal blow. Well, actually He was never there in the first place. Science has triumphed and can explain everything and goes marching off into the sunset.

Yet some will still ask why, if God does not exist, do we have this hunger for Him. This need. And, of course, what about the soul?

Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist from Ontario has the answer to that question. And he thinks he can prove it too. When early man first realised that he was doomed to die it must have come as a bit of a shock. In order for him to be able to accept this, evolution contrived a neat little trick which caused our brains to sometimes have hallucinations and make us believe we were privy to an apparition from the heavens. Yes, God came down to us and told us it was all right, because when we died, we would not cease to exist, but continue on in an afterlife. We had a soul. This eased the apprehension of death, not only in early humans, but in mankind today as well. In order to demonstrate this, he uses what is called a God Helmet. A volunteer dons this helmet and is isolated in a completely dark room. His eyes are covered and there is absolutely no sound. After a while a magnetic field is applied to the helmet which activates a part of the brain called the temporal lobe. When volunteers are questioned afterward, they report that they entered a mystical state, felt a presence or had visions of one or more figures. Persinger claims these can explain all the reported instances involving the appearance of God, angels and saints down through the ages.

I think, just because volunteers using the God Helmet may experience these visions or whatever you want to call them, doesn’t necessarily prove that somebody who went through a religious experience or theophany simply had exactly the same experience. Schizophrenics can hear voices in their heads, but this doesn’t mean that the voices you and I hear every day are coming from our minds. They are, in the sense that the mind interprets the vibrations from our ear caused by another human voice, but the source is another person speaking to us. Similarly a mystic may have a vision of God which could be a real vision. Because the God Helmet may produce a similar sensation doesn’t negate the possibility of the other.

There are those who also suggest that we are living in a computer simulation and once again they have proof! Well, a reasonable suggestion as to why we might be in such a simulation. Science has found that everything in this universe is digital. We are made of atoms, so there is either an atom at this position or there isn’t. Digital. Even space itself is made up of virtual particles. So in essence a virtual particle can appear here or not. Digital. But as space is really combined with time in a space-time continuum, then time itself is made up of discrete bits. Once again digital. In theory it is possible for a very powerful computer to simulate a complex universe with life in it. So perhaps we are exactly that.

Once again a very interesting idea, but personally I don’t buy it. Why? Because it means that if this is true, then there is someone or something running the simulation – our creator. Or maybe even a human from our future. The speculations can be endless, but it still leaves that damnable question. Maybe we are a computer simulation, but what about our simulation operator. Is he also a simulation in an even bigger simulation? And if so, what about his operator. This sounds very familiar territory. Just like who made God.

The bottom line is, why is there something rather than nothing? Of course that still doesn’t mean there is a God! So we’re simply going around the mulberry bush again.

One thing which has always struck me is the fact that today we think we know so much. Actually, we thought we knew everything about a hundred years ago. In fact, going even further back, Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician and astronomer, had famously replied when questioned as to what God’s place was in the universe that he had no need of such a hypothesis. And in the early 20th century some scientists were of the opinion that all that remained for science to do was to calculate out to the next few places of decimals and everything would be sown up. Then relativity and quantum mechanics arrived to blow that idea right out of the water.

Today we still struggle with our theories and have the audacity, some might say, to theorise about the beginning of our known universe and even what went before. Whatever our theories heading into the future will be, one thing is for sure. Our past theories were wrong. Our present theories are wrong. And no doubt our future ones will be wrong too. Maybe we will hit on the right ones in time. Maybe we won’t.

So, to sum up, I guess science has answers, rightly or wrongly, which have now squeezed God out of existence. There are other explanations which may or may not be true. Maybe the universe just popped into existence or was always there. Maybe God was always there.

Whatever the truth of the matter, I think if there is a God and another existence in a spiritual world, I don’t think we will ever find proof of it in this life. Physical matter and spirit are two very different things. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is only physical matter and no such thing as spirit. Perhaps science is our only hope.

But I don’t believe it is quite so simple. I have a niggling feeling that there has to be something more than a universe which was always there, something more than a computer simulation, something more than our minds making us think there is something else there rather than have us face the bleakness of death. Do not go gentle into that good night. Then again, maybe I’m engaging in wishful thinking. I guess that is why I’m an agnostic and proud to be such.