Descending Babel: Chapter 23

The 14 ^th Step: Laws of Physics & the Natural World

Physics - Atom I'n all my soul-searching and wandering through religious and philosophical texts, I realized I had lost touch with the sciences I had so previously loved. When I returned to investigating the sciences I was still somewhat enamored by Eastern Philosophy (see Chapter 20) so began by reading books that had an 'eastern' bent: The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics by Gary Zukav, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality by John Gribbin, and Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert. From there I went on to read Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, Steven Weinberg, James Gleick, Roger Penrose, Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Gerald Edelman, Christof Koch, and Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais. I read Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, The Voyage of the Beagle and The Descent of Man from cover-to-cover. Thoroughly inundated myself with the reading of science, I went on to investigate Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Planck's Constant, Schrödinger's Equation, Time Dilation and the Lorentz Transformation, the Maxwell Equations, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. All such reading confirmed what I already knew, a knowledge as clear as the nose on my face, in regards to the claims of Christianity.

There is the world we live in and then there is the world of the Bible. In our world, the 'real world', the world of flesh and matter, there is no magic, no metaphysical conjuring, nothing supernatural or transmundane. What exists is experienced empirically—through the five senses—and therefore measurable, testable, subject to examination and experiment and ongoing scrutiny. Sure there is talk of the supernatural, of the occult, of miracles and faith healing and psychic phenomena, events or agents that can nonchalantly circumvent the laws of physics. There are books and movies and TV shows and sermons from the pulpit and paintings of supernatural entities like angels and ogres and ascending gods aglow and crowned with halos. But in the 'real world', the world outside of language and art, the world we live in each day, there none of these things. None. And make no mistake about it, science has looked.

Science has been looking into claims of the supernatural for centuries, spent millions of dollars, rigorously tested the various assertions of preternatural behavior, and found that the world simply does not work this way. If someone claims they can communicate with your dead loved one, they are lying to you. If someone claims they can lay hands and cure cancer, they are lying to you. If someone claims they can levitate or walk on water or read your future, they are lying to you. The evidence is clear and specific: Any claim that contradicts the laws of physics is either an intentional lie or an unverifiable belief. This is not merely a 'naturalistic presupposition' as bemoaned by Christian apologists, but simply the way things are. The way this world works can be proven again and again, rigorously tested, realistically examined, with millions of experiments. If the apologists want to make 'supernaturalistic presuppositions' (i.e., assume the existence of the supernatural going in) can these likewise be proven, tested, evidenced, anywhere in the world? Where exactly does the supernatural realm exist? Where is the only place that apologists can point to for proof?

Only at words. Because they are unable to point to anything in the world, they can only point at words in a book and are forced to manipulate language in order to argue, defend, and debate a supernaturalism that is nowhere else in evidence. All things being equal, whose presupposition is the more rational, the more intellectually honest, the more coherent? The person who presupposes a natural world susceptible to and driven by natural laws based on known evidence, or the person who presupposes a supernatural world based solely on words in a book? If all the books went away tomorrow, all writing, all language, we would still be able to deduce our natural world and its natural laws. Without words what could the apologists deduce? What defines reality? Interaction with the world we live in or words in a book? If all the words in the world were suddenly removed, isn't reality that which remains? This is one of the reasons why religious books have become so important to religious believers because without having words to point to they would have no other evidence of the supernatural, and in order for religion to hold sway you must buy into the notion of the supernatural.

Most religions claim that life is more than the flesh and matter we see around us, that encloses us, of which we are composed. In addition, religions suppose some sort of spiritual or supernatural realm that exists 'behind' everything, beyond the scope of science and measurement, imperceptible and undetectable, and that our 'true selves' are really spiritual entities, not material at all. Since all this depends on claims that are outside the scope of science and therefore undetectable, how does religion 'know' to talk about it? If the spiritual realm can't be seen or measured, or Heaven, or even God, how did religion come up with attributes, characteristics, features, properties? Isn't religion simply a case of word association, of words pointing back and forth to other words since they are unable to point anywhere else? If not for words, where would God, Satan, Heaven, Hell, Eternal Life, Sin, Salvation, Jesus, Holy Spirit, et al, be found?

To date all the evidence has determined that life is strictly a natural phenomenon, that who we are—our selves—is material, a series of physical interactions, dependent upon the biochemical workings of the brain. Our sense of self, our personalities, the way we perceive the world, can be severely altered by head injury, stroke, or chemical imbalance. With a serious enough injury we can even be considered 'brain dead' although all our autonomic functions (heartbeat, constriction/dilation of blood vessels, constriction/dilation of the pupils, digestion, respiration, perspiration, relaxation and contraction of the bowels and sphincters, erection and ejaculation, child birth, and tear formation) operate normally. That sense of 'who were are' can be altered, reversed, even 'die', because it's fully dependent upon our physical being, a broad synthesis of our material surroundings, environment, cultural prejudices, parental influences and biases, birth order, sex, physical appearance, stored memory, bones, flesh, blood, eyes, ears, mouth, and a steady oxygen supply. Everything we think we are we owe solely to the state of our flesh and empirical surroundings, a process impossible to remove from the intrinsic network of matter. With all the above suddenly in absence, what would remain to 'stand' in judgment before the Throne of God, and what mechanisms (or lack thereof) would propel interaction with the Divine Inquisitor? We are natural entities, part and parcel with the natural world, expressly subject to natural laws. We are like all other animals in that respect, who exhibit no supernatural tendencies. Unless these animals appear in the Bible.

In the Bible animals can talk, wizards and witches summon spirits, demons possess pigs, sticks turn into snakes, food falls from the sky, people walk on water or through walls or remain lost for forty years in an area roughly this size of West Virginia. In the Bible the dead can come back to life, enough rain fall in seven weeks to cover the entire planet, all sorts of magical things happen that have no basis in the way we know the 'real world' works. If you know the world doesn't work this way, if all the evidence shows it impossible for the world to work this way, then what are your reasons for believing the Bible when it claims otherwise? You'd consider yourself crazy if you believed Greek and Roman myths that claimed the same types of things, or fairy tales, or old European fables, simply because you know how the world works and it doesn't work that way. And yet, when the Bible makes claims contrary to the way you know the world works, not only do you believe and defend it, but consider all those who don't as the ones who are living in error. Is this an honest assessment? Shouldn't what we believe somehow coincide with what we actually know?

The short answer to all of this? The Bible and Christianity don't stand up under scrutiny. There are too many glaring contradictions and inconsistencies, incoherent reasoning and moral repugnances, ethical sidesteps and magical presuppositions. The billion different observations of science have negated the supernatural claims of the Bible, so to continue believing in it as 'inspired' and 'inerrant' has more to do with indoctrination, psychology, and denial than with rational research and truth seeking.