Read The Previous Five Articles on Science, Faith and Beauty in This Order
I posted the previous five articles in this section as a series, in the order I intended them to be read, which means they appear in reverse order on this page. So read them from the bottom up, that is:
Science is a Faith - Even for Atheists
Does Quantum Mechanics Undermine Materialism? Part I: Determinism, Free Will, and the First Cause
Does Quantum Mechanics Undermine Materialism? Part II: Minds, God, and the Beauty of Creation
God Always Fills the Gap! The only question is whether he uses natural science to do so
Perhaps God Does Play Dice! Uncertainty is Essential To Quantum Mechanics...And So Is a Knowing Mind
I wrote a short summary of the points they make below.
I wrote them because I have been frustrated whenever I hear talks on science and faith, even by believing Catholics. I believe the conventional approach to such discussions, which takes science and reason as the standard, then attempts to show that faith and the arts can (or cannot) meet that standard, has it backward. I am arguing that, in fact, science is inescapably rooted in faith, even for those who consider themselves atheist materialists. I should say at the outset that these articles do not attempt to prove God from physics; faith is a gift, not a deduction. What they offer is something more modest and, I hope, more useful: an assurance that the findings of natural science, honestly examined, give the materialist far less support than he assumes, and the believer far more.
In the first article, I present the full argument that science itself rests on faith. Every scientist must assume, before he begins, that the universe is ordered, that this order is intelligible to the human mind, and that it is describable mathematically. None of these premises can be proven by the scientific method; they must be accepted before the method can operate at all. Historically, they entered Western thought, which is what has driven scientific progress, through Christian theology: a rational Creator makes a rational creation, and makes man in his image with the capacity to read it. The scientist who denies the spiritual is not more rigorous than the believer; he is simply unaware of the credal foundations of his own discipline.
The second and third articles engage the work of the Catholic physicist Stephen Barr on quantum mechanics. The particle physics tells us that individual events at the quantum level- the decay of an atom, the arrival of a photon- are not determined by any prior physical state. Physics can calculate the probability of an outcome, but never the outcome itself, and the mathematics of the theory tells us this is not a temporary gap in knowledge but a structural feature of reality. Barr argues, and I agree, that probability of its nature requires a knower, a mind for whom the outcome is uncertain until it is observed directly, and therefore that mind cannot be eliminated from physics. The implications of this are far-reaching. If a knowing mind is a necessary component at the quantum level, then a non-material cause is operating at the foundation of the physical world, and with that, three pillars of the secular worldview fall together: materialism, which holds that the physical is all there is; physical determinism, which holds that every event is fixed by prior physical causes; and scientism, which holds that science alone gives us truth. This is precisely why the atheist materialist cannot leave the question alone, and his worldview is threatened by the philosophical implications of quantum physics more than any form of physics has ever threatened the worldview of those who believe in God.
In short, one might say that probability concerns degrees of certainty and uncertainty, which presuppose a person who is either certain or uncertain. I extend his argument to ask what resolves quantum indeterminacy across the whole cosmos, where no human observer is present, and suggest that the most coherent answer is the one the Church has always given: God, the First Cause, continuously present to and sustaining every event in creation. I also draw a connection, more speculative but I think one that is suggested by this, between this requirement for a knower and the Thomistic account of beauty, in which claritas, the radiance by which a thing makes itself known, presupposes one to whom it is made known. Beauty is a transcendental property of being - that is, all that exists possesses it -, and so this raises the question of whether all that exists is known in some way.
The fourth article confronts the obvious objection: is this not just another God-of-the-gaps argument, destined to collapse when science closes the gap? My answer is to reject the framing itself. God is the author of the order that natural science describes, so he and science are not rivals competing for the same explanatory territory. God always fills the gap. The only question, in any given case, is whether he does so through natural causes that science can describe or through causes that lie beyond physics. Newton did not displace God from the universe; he described the order through which God sustains it. The quantum case is distinctive because the mathematics itself tells us that no physical cause can be found.
In the final article, I argue that the only way to remove the need for a knowing mind from quantum mechanics is to remove probability from it; without probability, what we have is no longer quantum mechanics but either conventional classical, ie Newtonian physics (which seems very unlikely at this point), or something else entirely, as yet unimagined…or divine intervention! Even Einstein, who resisted the probabilistic character of the theory all his life, insisting that God does not play dice, could not find a way around it.
A point I make in the articles themselves is worth repeating here: as a Christian, I have no axe to grind in this debate. Science may yet produce an explanation that eliminates the need for a knower; it has not definitively done so, but if it does, I will be happy to accept it, for no description of the natural order, whatever it shows, is any threat to my faith, which is neither derived from (nor contradicted by) any scientific evidence. The urgency lies on the other side. The current situation appears to undermine physical determinism, a tenet fundamental to the atheist materialist worldview, and so it is the materialist, not the believer, who needs the gap filled by science. If he cannot do so, for even one observed phenomenon, then his worldview collapses.
Readers of this blog will know that my usual subject is sacred art, and they may wonder what a painter is doing writing about physics. But this series belongs to the same project as everything else I write. My concern has always been the integration of faith and culture, and science is as much a part of our culture as art, music, and architecture. The same Catholic vision that tells us why an icon is painted without cast shadows also tells us that the universe is mathematically intelligible, and that beauty, whether in a Baroque altarpiece or in an elegant equation, is a sign of the divine mind. What makes this approach unusual, I think, is that it treats the scientist and the artist as engaged in the same fundamentally creative and contemplative activity: both are reading the pattern of the divine order and responding to it. This has a practical consequence for how scientists ought to be formed. Scientific creativity depends on an aesthetic sense of the order of the cosmos; it is this intuition of beauty and pattern that generates the initial ideas from which hypotheses are formed, before any testing begins. It follows that scientists would benefit from a traditional formation in beauty, of the kind once given to artists, as part of their scientific training, and I make this case in the series.
Before I was a painter, I trained as a scientist, earning degrees in metallurgical engineering and materials science, and I have never felt the two halves of that formation in tension. This series is my attempt to show why they are not, and why the believer can walk into the laboratory, as into the studio, with complete confidence, and perhaps with greater confidence than the atheist materialist can occupy either. For the materialist must borrow premises he cannot justify in order to do his science, and can give no good account of why beauty should move him at all. The Christian is at home in the laboratory, the studio, and the church alike, because for him they are all rooms in the same house, his Father’s house. The materialist, however brilliant, and I say this as a friendly challenge rather than a dismissal, is in each of them a lodger in separate, unconnected rooms.
I finish with the words of Benedict XVI from his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (in the chapter “Music and Liturgy,” Part Three: Art and Liturgy)
“The mathematics of the universe does not exist by itself, nor, as people now came to see, can it be explained by stellar deities. It has a deeper foundation: the mind of the Creator. It comes from the Logos, in whom, so to speak, the archetypes of the world’s order are contained. The Logos, through the Spirit, fashions the material world according to these archetypes. In virtue of his work in creation, the Logos is, therefore, called the “art of God” (ars = techne!)[...]All true human art is an assimilation to the artist, to Christ, to the mind of the Creator.”