The Hidden Face of God

How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth

Gerald L. Schroeder

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780743216838
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Gerald Schroeder, an MIT-trained scientist who has worked in both physics and biology, has emerged in recent years as one of the most popular and accessible apostles for the melding of science and religion. He 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. Recent research in biology, chemistry, physics, and neuroscience contains unmistakable hints about the ultimate nature of reality. Simply put, we now know not only that behind matter lies energy, but also that behind energy lies wisdom. Scientists have touched on this wisdom in the laboratory, and its implications are awesome.
From the wisdom encoded in DNA and analyzed by information science, to the wisdom unveiled in the fantastic complexity of cellular life, to the wisdom inherent in human consciousness, The Hidden Face of God offers a tour of the best of modern science. Schroeder makes no attempt to "prove" the existence of God. Yet his interpretations of the work of his fellow scientists touch on life's ultimate mysteries. His wise observations on the organization of organic life, on the power of humans to make sense of their sensory inputs, and on the complexities of the code of DNA all show that life has a direction and purpose that cannot be explained in purely physical terms. Throughout, he addresses three great themes: the question of first causes (i.e., where do the laws of nature come from?); the inseparability of mind and matter; and the philosophical problem of design. To believe that a designer must have been involved, he reminds us, we need not insist on perfection or on our view of perfection in the design.
The Hidden Face of God will open a world of science to religious believers, and it will cause skeptics to rethink some of their deepest beliefs.

1

THE PUZZLE OF EXISTENCE: AN OVERVIEW

Theology is not simply a matter of interpreting scriptures, be it the Bible, the Koran, or the Tao Te Ching. Theology brings us the amazing concept of a metaphysical Force that brought the physical universe into being. The universe is the physical expression of the metaphysical. All that we know of the putative Creator is found within the physical creation. With this in mind, it is incongruous to describe a theology without the insights of science.

When I picture the earth and solar system hanging in the vastness of space, I feel an anxious need to grab hold of something stable. We’re a minuscule speck, somehow floating in the seemingly endless dark of the night sky. It’s at those times that I realize all existence hangs by a thread, the breadth of a hair. But the puzzle of our tenuous place in space is secondary to the most baffling riddle of all: that of existence itself. It’s a question we might prefer to ignore.

Why is there an “is”? Why is there something, anything, rather than nothing? In our fascination with life’s origin and evolution, we bypass this most basic of conundrums. The very fact and nature of existence, the finite aspects of the physical world we view about us, the limited nature of time, space, and matter from which we and all the universe are constructed, force upon us the unsettling reality that at some level there is the metaphysical. Some undefined whatever, transcendent of the physical, produced the physical? Atheist, agnostic, skeptic, and “believer” all share the understanding that some metaphysical non-thing, metaphysical in the sense of being above or outside of the physical, must have preceded our universe or have our universe imbedded in it. That much is a certainty.

But is this metaphysical force that produced our universe Godly? That is not an easy question. It is, however, probably the most important of questions. And the answer really depends on one’s definition of God. Just what are the expectations of how an infinite, incorporeal metaphysical creating force would be made manifest within the finite corporeality of the universe? It may be definitions more than reality that separate skeptic from believer, especially if one’s expectations of the metaphysical or of the physical are what was learned as a child.

To have a prayer of probing intelligently the subtleties of the metaphysics of existence, we first had better understand the essence of existence at the physical level. In the coming chapters we’ll get into the molecular workings that underlie life and discover a complexity so extreme, so overwhelmingly elaborate, that it outdoes science fiction by a league. And then we’ll confront a most intriguing enigma: what allows life to conceive a thought, to imagine a rainbow, a symphony? Is the mind totally the neurological workings of the brain or is there a brain/mind interface where the physical mingles with the nonphysical? That would make the brain an instrument, a sort of antenna that taps into the consciousness of the universe. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

Discoveries in the fields of physics, cosmology, and molecular biology during the past few decades have moved us ever closer to what might be termed a metaphysical truth. First of all, there is the creation itself: how did the universe come into existence? And then there is the orderly yet phenomenally complex information we find encoded time and again in all aspects of nature, and most especially in life. The wisdom contained therein is not at all evident in the physical building blocks from which life, even in its simplest of forms, is composed. And finally, there is the puzzle of consciousness and the brain/mind interface. Is mind more that the sum of the physical parts of the brain? The possibility that mind is an emergent property of brain echoes the emergence of wisdom in nature. Of course, the suggestion of a ubiquitous wisdom raises the problem of imperfect design. If life is indeed the result of an intelligent force, why are there so many less-than-optimum aspects in its design? I will briefly discuss these topics in this chapter and then pursue the details in the rest of the book. As the saying goes, God is in the details.

Creation and a First Cause

Is there a universal consciousness, an entanglement that at some subtle level ties all existence together? At the moment of the big bang everything, the entire universe, you included, was part of a homogeneous speck—no divisions, no separations—an undifferentiated iota filled with exquisitely powerful energy, a speck no larger than the black pupil of an eye. And before this there was neither time nor space nor matter. That speck was the entire universe. Not a speck within some vacuous space. A vacuum is space. The speck was the entire universe. There was no other space. No outside to the inside of the creation. Creation was everywhere at once. And then the space and the energy stretched out to form all that exists today in the heavens and on the earth. You (and I too) were once part of a total unity, a single burst of radiation. It formed our bodies and led to our thoughts. As incomprehensible as it may seem, we, the essence that was eventually to form our beings, were present at the creation.

When we leave the workings of the macro-world and enter the world of the atom, we are confronted with an even more surprising yet scientifically confirmed picture of our universe. First we discover that solid matter, the floor upon which we stand and the foundation that bears the weight of a skyscraper, is actually empty space. If we could scale the center of an atom, the nucleus, up to four inches, the surrounding electron cloud would extend to four miles away and essentially all the breach between would be marvelously empty. The solidity of iron is actually 99.9999999999999 percent startlingly vacuous space made to feel solid by ethereal fields of force having no material reality at all. Hollywood would have rejected such a script out of hand and yet it is the proven reality. But don’t knock your head against that space. Force fields can feel very solid.

To experience a force field, hold a heavy object out at arm’s length. Feel the downward pull. But what is doing the pulling? Gravity, you say. But what produces the gravity? Gravitons of course. But what are gravitons? For that question there is no answer. Where are the strings that tug down toward the earth? They are there, but other than the pull, they are totally imperceptible.

And then quantum physics came onto the scene, with its micro, micro world, only to prove to us that there is no reality. Not even the one part in a million billion that seemed to be solid. Ask a scientist, a physicist, what an electron or the quarks of a proton are made of. She or he will have no answer. Ask the composition of photons—the wave/particle packets of energy that underlie all those micro-particles of matter. The reply will be along the lines of “Huh?”

That all existence may be the expression of information, an idea, a quantum wave function, is not fantasy and it is not some flaky idea. It’s mainstream science coming from such universities as Princeton and M.I.T. There is the growing possibility that for all existence, we humans included, there’s nothing, nothing as in “no thing,” there. In the following chapters we’ll discover that the world is more a thought than a thing, more intangible than real. It’s essential to see the magnificent subtlety and bounds of how the physical world works if we are going to speculate concerning the metaphysical.

In science, there are easy questions and hard questions. The easy questions, though in practice hard to solve rigorously, all have material solutions. Examples include Newton’s phenomenal insight into the laws of motion and gravity; Einstein’s revolutionary concepts of relativity. The hard questions relate to what seem to be the intrinsic qualities of nature. Why is there a force of gravity and why does matter generate such a force? Of what are the fundamental particles of matter, electrons, quarks, composed? What is energy?

And then there is what Professor David Chalmers of the department of psychology at the University of Arizona describes as the very hard question. It is that at which I am aiming. What is the mind?

Mind/Matter

The easy part of that question deals with the brain. Wiggle your toes. Feel them? But where do you feel them? Not in your toes. Toes feel nothing. You feel them in your brain. Anyone who has had the misfortune of having a limb amputated can tell you how the missing limb continues to be felt—in the brain. The brain has within it maps of the body that record every sensation and then project that sensation onto the mental image of the relevant body part. But it certainly feels like I’m feeling my toes in my toes. And it is not just the toes. The entire reality, what we see and what we feel, what we smell and what we hear, is mapped in the brain and then those recorded sensations reach out to our consciousness from within the two-to-four-millimeter (about one-eighth-inch) thin wrinkled gray layer, the cerebral cortex, that rests at the top of each of our brains. There is a reality out there in the world, but what we experience—every touch and every sound, every sight, smell and taste—arises in our heads. All our mental images, fantasy or factual, are built on our life’s experiences and these are totally physically based. Pure abstraction, even in mathematics, is more than difficult. It is impossible. Even numbers and symbols of calculus take on mental forms.

Through the dedicated and precise work of extraordinarily skilled scientists we now know how and where in the brain each of our sensations is processed and stored. That has been mapped to near perfection. And I explore those maps in the coming chapters. The processes are nothing less that mind-boggling.

And then comes the hard part of the hard question: the sound of music. The waves of sound impinge upon my eardrum and in a beautifully complex path become converted to bioelectrical pulses that are chemically stored in the cortex of my brain. (We’ll look at that path in detail.) But how do I hear the sound? Up to and including the storage of the data in the brain, it’s all biochemistry. But I don’t hear biochemistry. I hear sound. Where’s the sound generated in my head? Or the vision; or the smell? Where’s the consciousness? Just which of those formerly inert atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on, in my head have become so clever that they can produce a thought or reconstitute an image? How those stored biochemical data points are recalled and replayed into sentience remains an enigmatic mystery.

Organization separates living matter from what we perceive as inert, lifeless matter. But there is no innate physical difference between the atoms before and after they organize, learn to take energy from their surrounding environment, and become, as a group, alive. However there is what appears to be a qualitative transition between the awesome biochemistry by which the brain physically records the incoming data and the consciousness by which we become aware of that stored information. In that passage from brain to mind we may be looking for a physical link that does not exist.

Could the consciousness we perceive as the mind be as fundamental as, let’s say, the phenomena of gravity generated by mass, or the electrical charge generated by a proton? Gravity and charge are emergent properties. They emanate from substrate particles, as for example gravity from mass, and extend throughout the universe. And though each particle continually emits its field, the emission does not “use up” the particle. For all the force of the field, it seems the force emerges from, but is not made of, the particle from which it arises. Though it originates with the substrate particle, the field is not part of the particle.

Time provides an additional clue in the brain/mind puzzle. We drift in a river of time. There’s no possibility of swimming upstream, of going back in time. Destroy every clock, every item that feels the passage of time. The flow of time continues unabated. Time is an intrinsic, ubiquitous quality of our universe, irrespective of whether or not we measure its passage. Might consciousness also be an intrinsic, all-present part of nature, of the universe? In that case every particle would have some aspect of consciousness within. The more complex the entity, the greater would be its awareness of the consciousness housed within.

If quantum physics is correct, and it has an excellent track record of being on the mark, then this suggestion is not so very far from mainstream thought. Every particle, every body, each aspect of existence appears to be an expression of information, information that via our brains or our minds, we interpret as the physical world. Physicist Freeman Dyson, upon his acceptance of the Templeton Prize, stated the idea this way: “Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.” These are the words of one of today’s leaders in physics!

From the tiniest grain of sand to the brain of an Einstein, all existence, animate and inanimate, is the product of the same ninety-two elements that are themselves the harvest of the energy of the creation. At every turn an underlying commonality, a unity, emerges from within the diversity.

Now quantum physics has moved us to a more uncanny realization: that at some level this commonality extends to what can be described as an instantaneous mutual awareness among all particles, regardless of the distance of separation. What occurs on one side of the universe seems to affect events on the other side and all points in between. If indeed there is a universal consciousness, this could explain the interrelatedness of particles even when separated by large distances. The most famous demonstration of this is presented in the persistently arcane observations obtained in the “double-slit” experiment. Particles, be they ethereal photons of energy, featherweight electrons or massive atoms, passing through a slit, call it “A,” somehow know, and react accordingly, to conditions at far-off slit “B.” Among those variable conditions at B is whether or not a conscious observer is present. These data carry a hint that perhaps—just perhaps—consciousness affects the physical manifestation of existence.

It took humanity millennia before an Einstein discovered that, as bizarre as it may seem, the basis of matter is energy, that matter is actually condensed energy. It may take a while longer for us to discover that there is some non-thing even more fundamental than energy that forms the basis of energy, which in turn forms the basis of matter. The renowned former president of the American Physical Society and professor of physic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also By
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PROLOGUE
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• APPENDIX C
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX