Does God Have a Monopoly on Spirituality?

Michael Meacher. Destination of the Species. O Books, Winchester and Washington, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84694-263-1. £9.99 (US $19.95) 243pp.

Prof. Peter Saunders

Many people in the West find themselves in a quandary. Modern science and the way of thinking that goes with it seem to be in conflict with the religion they were brought up in. Does that mean they must abandon their religion when it still seems to offer much that science apparently cannot? Or must they divide their minds into compartments, one for material matters and a separate one for the spiritual? Is the idea of “two non-overlapping magisterial” [1] realistic anyway?

It is significant that for almost everyone who worries about such issues, “religion” means Christianity or something very much like it, and not any one of the major Eastern religions like Buddhism or Taoism, still less one of the many local religions of indigenous people. And the only alternative that they can envisage is contemporary science. Hardly anyone seems to consider either the possibility of something that’s not what we customarily think of as science and yet does not involve the supernatural, or that science itself could be far broader than it is generally perceived today. They also assume that any question we can ask – such as “What is the universe for?” – must have an answer and, what is more, an answer we can expect to find or be told. This makes the whole discussion less relevant to many of us, but it can still be interesting to follow as long as we bear in mind how much is being taken for granted.

One who has thought deeply about these questions is the Labour MP and environmentalist Michael Meacher. In The Destination of Species, he describes his quest to find what it is that he really believes; starting with whether there is a God at all. Ultimately, of course, this is a matter of faith, but is it only that? Or is there scientific evidence that makes belief still plausible in the twenty first century?

Was the universe designed?

Meacher devotes a large part of his book to what many Christians consider to be the strongest argument for a God, the ‘argument from design’. There are many things about the universe that appear to have been designed for a purpose, and that, they claim, tells us there must be an intelligent being that designed them. If we see a watch, we can be pretty sure that somewhere we will find a watchmaker [2].

For a long time, the strongest evidence appeared to be the existence of living organisms. Surely they cannot possibly have come into being through the action of natural forces. In the end, of course, Charles Darwin showed how they could have (not, by the way, had) evolved by natural selection. The argument from design survives, however, and the current version concerns the ‘fine tuning problem’.

This arises in the following way. Modern physicists have been remarkably successful at explaining many of the features of the universe. From a small number of fundamental equations they have constructed convincing accounts of how the universe has evolved, how the elements were created, how the stars were formed, and so on.

These equations naturally contain a number of constants:  Einstein’s gravitational constant, Planck’s constant, the charge on the election, and so on.  The values of these constants are calculated from the results of experiments. At first glance, there appears to be nothing unusual about them. The constants had to have some values; these are just the ones they happen to have. But eventually some physicists began to wonder what would have happened if they had been different. Obviously the universe would have been a bit different – if the gravitational constant were greater than it is, apples would fall faster – but would it matter any more than that?

Surprisingly, it turns out that it would. If you use the same equations with different constants, you end up with a universe in which there could be no life.

For example, if the nuclear weak force had been much stronger than it is, all the hydrogen would have been immediately turned into helium and there would be no water. There would also be no long-lived stable stars, and so no planets with temperatures suitable for life to evolve. If it had been significantly weaker, that too would have meant all the hydrogen would be destroyed.

If the nuclear strong force had not had very nearly its actual value, there would be no carbon, the element on which all life is built. If the electromagnetic force were only slightly stronger, no elements heavier than iron could be formed in the stars; if it were weaker then again there would be no stable main sequence stars.  And so on.

Could all this have happened purely by chance? The probability that out of all the values it might conceivably have, each of the constants should be within the tiny range that makes life possible must be infinitesimally small. Surely we can only conclude that the universe was designed so that there could be life in it, and so there must have been a Designer.

Ingenious though it is, I don’t find this argument as compelling as Meacher, and many others do. In the first place, history warns us that arguments from design are always in danger of being overtaken as science progresses. Many physicists are already working on theories that they hope will explain what we now see as fine tuning. If they succeed, then they will refute the current version of the argument.

The fine tuning argument assumes that what we call the laws of physics really are the laws that govern our universe and, what is more, would hold in any possible universe. They are, in Meacher’s words, universal, absolute, timeless and omnipotent. We can imagine changes in the values of the constants, though not, it seems, in the laws themselves.

But these so-called laws are really only our best shot, so far, at describing our universe and unifying our observations with as small a set of assumptions as we can manage. They do this remarkably well, but that does not mean that they are real laws that the universe obeys. Scientists in the past may have believed that Newton had discovered God’s laws, but since this view was overthrown by relativity and quantum mechanics, we no longer make such grandiose claims for our theories. The fine tuning that so concerns some people is not so much a property of the universe as a property of the mathematical models that we use to describe it.

True, the theories lead to remarkably accurate predictions, but that does not mean that they are close to the truth in a fundamental sense. In almost all cases, Newtonian gravitation and Einstein’s General Relativity give results that are so close that it is very difficult to design experiments to distinguish between the two. Yet they are based on quite different views of how the universe works.

We may still ask where our universe and its structure came from, and what purpose, if any, they are meant to serve, but these questions are no more awkward for the materialist than if we ask a religious person where God came from. In fact they are less awkward, because the materialist does not, or at least should not, claim that human beings, insignificant as we are in the vast expanse of space and time that is the universe, are capable of ever reaching the complete understanding that many religions promise, if only in another life. We can all agree that now we see through a glass darkly, but only religious people (and a few fundamentalist scientists) believe that some day it will be face to face.

Was the universe designed for us?

Whether or not we agree with Meacher so far, we can still follow him on his quest. Suppose there is a God and he did create the universe so that there could be life. Was it also part of his plan that humans would eventually appear? Are we the culmination of creation?

I suspect that when Meacher started out, he was hoping he could convince himself that we are. That would have brought him closer to the God of the Bible; and the scientific account of creation much closer to Genesis. But when he reviews what is known about the evolution of the planet and the organisms that inhabit it, he concludes that the evidence does not support this. There are too many points at which things could just have easily gone a different way and humans would never have appeared. God may have meant there to be life in his universe, but it seems it didn’t have to be us.

How then did we get here? Meacher is clearly repelled by the neo-Darwinian view that the universe is driven by “pitiless, directionless chance” and he looks to complexity and emergence to temper this. Here he could have made his case much stronger if he had drawn on the work of D’Arcy Thompson [3] and the many others who have shown how far the living world can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, however these came to be, rather than by natural selection. I could even recommend some work by the editors of SiS [4].

Meacher also believes that the ‘emergent’ properties that are observed in complex systems require new laws. But they do not; they emerge (hence the name) out of the operation of familiar ones. We are more likely to understand what they do by studying them at their own level than by reductionism, but that’s a different point. That is why chemistry is studied as a subject with its own “laws” even though every chemist believes that chemical properties arise ultimately out of physical interactions. When God set up the laws of physics (if that’s where you believe they came from) he also arranged for all the emergent properties to exist, even if it took us a rather long time to realise this.

A place for spirituality?

Where, then, has Meacher’s quest taken him? He concludes that while belief in God depends ultimately on revelation and personal non-scientific experience, there is enough scientific evidence in favour that it is not inconsistent with modern thought. For him and others like him, this opens the possibility of what he describes as a proud and existential reality, not capable of being proven but only to be understood “in the fullness of experience.” Spirituality, he argues, gives us a counter to the scientific reductionism and rampant consumerism that have become so influential in the West, especially since the middle of the last century.

Meacher is surely right that we need more in our lives than what contemporary mainstream science has to offer. Where many will disagree is with his belief that the rest has to involve the supernatural. This is less of an issue than it might be because he acknowledges the personal nature of revelation.  As Thomas Paine wrote [5], what might be a revelation to one person is only hearsay to those to whom he tells it and they are not obliged to believe it. Most of us can find much of value in religions we don’t happen to believe in; what we object to is being expected to give privileged status to each and every idea they contain.

I certainly find myself much more in sympathy with a religious person like Meacher than with secular scientists like Richard Dawkins [6] and others who have absolute faith in the theory they advocate. For example, Daniel Dennett writes [7], “Darwin’s dangerous idea [the theory of natural selection] is reductionism incarnate, promising to unite and explain just about everything in one magnificent vision.” This reads to me like the sort of claim we encounter in many religious writings, the sort that Meacher explicitly rejects.  

As you’d expect from someone so committed to environmental issues, Meacher ends his book with an appeal for us to stop despoiling the Earth on which we and other organisms depend. At least part of his argument for this comes from his religious views, and so he considers these ideas as part of spirituality. Others may come to similar conclusions from quite different religious perspectives or through purely secular considerations. Myself, I find that not only do I agree with his conclusions, I also agree with most of the reasoning by which he arrives at them.

Is even the starting point all that different? As an atheist, I don’t find it very surprising that a religious person who has done his best to free himself from dogma should see many things much as I do. I suppose Meacher might counter that his God can speak to atheists whether they are aware of it or not.

Article first published 24/02/11

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References and Notes

1. Gould SJ.  Nonoverlapping Magisteria. Natural History 1997, 106, 16-22.
2. Paley W. Natural Theology, or Evidences of the existences and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 5th edition, F&J Rivington, London, 1802.
3. Thompson, D’A W. On Growth and Form Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1917.
4. See for example: Ho MW & Saunders PT (eds) Beyond Neo-Darwinism. Academic Press, London, 1984; Saunders PT The organism as a dynamical system. In Thinking about Biology, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Lecture Notes Vol. III (F.Varela & W. Stein, eds). Addison Wesley, Reading, 1993, pp 41-63. And for different laws that apply to organisms see Ho MW. The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms, World Scientific, Singapore and London, 1993, 2nd edition, 1998; 3rd edition, 2008/
5. Paine T. (1794-1796) The Age of Reason.
6. Dawkins R. The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976, and many books, articles and talks since then.
7. Dennett D. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. The Penguin Press, London, 1995, p82.