Mind and Brain

Is it possible that the mind can be more than the brain?

It seems evident on the face that the conscious activity of the mind and brain are the same. Damage to various areas of the brain effects function, as is widely noted. It seems pretty obvious. Yet, science struggles mightily when it tries to track down our conscious thoughts in the brain. Several brain scanning devices are employed, such as PET, MRI, MEG and such. They observe the electrical activity of the brain. But this is quite rudimentary. It’s something akin to tracing the journey of electrical currents in a computer and then trying to guess what the functions going to perform. Computers do have various functional areas, such as central processing unit (CPU), arithmetic and storage. The brain also shows a largely bewildering maze of functional areas. Damage to these areas like the Wernicke, a language comprehension area, can inhibit an individual from understanding what’s being said to them and speaking coherently.  This strongly hints that mind is brain.

But the brain does something a computer NEVER does, rewire itself. Plasticity of the brain occurs when the individual re-trains or enhances the neurons of the brain. Learning to read does this very thing. The wiring for reading is not innate in the brain. With considerable training, the student first mouthing out the words, the center for speech processing and language comprehension link up with the visual word form area of the brain. The question that doesn’t seem to be asked is who is prompting the rewiring? Well, the initial answer is the student but if all is brain, what portion or area of the brain activates the process of re-wiring? The response from neuro-scientists is that the process is DOMAIN GENERAL, but that’s really the same as what’s been called the Mind.

But it’s hard to overlook how critical the correct biological functioning of the brain plays on our minds. Stating the obvious without a pumping heart that delivers oxygen and blood to the brain, we don’t have consciousness. So can we rest here as most scientists and deny any mind beyond the functioning of the brain?

First I refer again to the above example of the mind prompting rewiring. Then the mind can have profound effects on our bodily functions, like blood pressure. Many diseases are related to stress, like heart disease, aches, pains, headaches, among others.  I’ve lost blood pressure 15 minutes after being placed on an IV, telling myself all the while that there’s nothing to get upset about, as my blood pressure drops to 90/60 (I’m usually 125/80) and getting faint. Indian fakirs historically have been reported having all manner of control over breathing and heart beat (being buried for extended periods of time). It’s not certain how reliable these stories are but they have been repeated for centuries. Spouses have died immediately after they’re widowed.

In previous writings I continued to assert the immateriality of the foundations of the material world, as represented by Quantum Physics. This view has been echoed by Idealist philosophers and theologians for millennia. It’s reasonable that the mind employing the brain is functioning on a Quantum immaterial level as well. The reasonable concession can be made that there are emergent Quantum processing during brain operations, but these cease after death.

However, existence beyond the functioning brain has been very well documented. People have flat lined for extended periods of time only to report their surroundings later. People with near death experiences report that what they encountered was MORE REAL than the reality they return to. Serious studies over decades have confirmed out of body experiences and near death experiences with third party corroboration. The scientific community rejects these narratives, since they don’t fit a Physicalist or Materialists view. There is powerful narrative to support them.

How can the mind produce material changes in the brain?  Well, there are two views here. One, the Materialist view is that the brain is doing something to itself, designated as Domain General Affects. There is no mind or independent mind.  And the second is that the mind is operating at a Quantum Level and fundamentally all matter is a phenomenon of Quantum physics, so there’s really no difference between mind and brain. The second appears the more compelling.

Descartes proposed a third approach in the 17^th century, a Mind Body split. He famously argued, “Cogito Ergo Sum!”…I think therefore I am. Descartes could only be sure about one thing; he had thoughts. I must agree we can be quite sure about thinking. For that matter Quantum Physics is mitigated through all manner of technological apparatus, after which we must accept the word of the Physicist. We can be assured that what they describe is likely to be accurate; nonetheless, we can’t be nearly as sure as our own thoughts.

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This begs the discussion of what to make of the thinking of a delusional individual. They are assured their thinking is correct. Yet, others can’t corroborate their observations. If one takes a Solipsist view, then they’d be right in there characterization of reality. But events don’t revolve around us. Things don’t turn out our way all the time. People leave us and pass on. And we can’t change reality to our desire. I’ve been reading some Occult literature and it’s their claim we’re mired in ignorance and there are master individuals operating on higher planes that command reality. They could fully explain it to us but we wouldn’t understand.

 I suppose there’s a chance we’re under a mass delusion. Actually many thinkers and religions adhere to this view; the observable universe is Maya, an illusion.  Plato has his Allegory of the Cave. The illusion is in thinking the observable universe is substantial reality not transitory. That’s dissimilar to not processing reality normally.  

And evolutionary biologists enjoy degrading the capabilities of the brain in its ability to ascertain reality accurately; it’s a brain designed to successfully adapt to the Serengeti Plain not necessarily discover reality. We see patterns that aren’t there, so we’re prone to conspiratorial thinking. We even alter our memories, it seems. So according to some scientists our judgments are erroneous and subject to imperfection, while our memories may not be reliable. There’s only science to allow us to arrive a true rendering of reality or so it’d seem. So it would be held that only information obtained by scientific inquiry is valid.

If the argument is carried out further, one could begin to question the “feeble” mind’s assessment regarding scientific truth as well. It might permit evidence that’s predictive but is it actually truth. Kuhn’s Structures of Scientific Revolution argues with each new revelation in science, world views can change making the previous assessments outdated like Ptolemaic universe to Copernican and Newtonian Mechanics to Quantum Physics. Hypotheses may be predictive and conform to experimental rigor but not be the actual truth. 

This thinking fails additionally in part because we’ve seen the destructive technologies scientists are content to devise like atomic bombs and hydrogen weapons and ICBM’s that allow them to cross the planet. The real catastrophe is humankind’s own venality, which goes far beyond any mental limitations we are subject to.

In summary the mind is more than the brain. Even for those not accepting the existence of mind after brain function ceases, something besides electrical impulses coursing through synapses occurs in brain activity. Retraining of the brain during learning to read and the placebo effect both show there’s something global within the brain that’s occurring.  

The Matrix: the Mind of the Observer

Let me review. First, Science is befuddled with the implications of the bizarre Quantum world and Einstein’s Relativity that shook Classical Newtonian physics to the core.

In addition, after a century of head scratching by scientists about the implications of the New Physics, someone began to see the striking similarities of this strangeness to Virtual Reality (VR) or simulations.

Finally, others have carried this conclusion to the supposition this VR just might be run by an immense intelligence of whom Mind is fundamental. The Movie, the Matrix, dramatizes a scenario conjuring this idea. This view in fact has been around for millennia.

Our mind is the most certain reality we experience. I’m going to set aside that fact the mind can be deluded and addled and be subject to sleep. And the question as to whether our healthy functioning mind is in reality mired in ignorance. This is a position held by Eastern Mystics. However, some element of our being must be prescient enough to will to suffer ascetic trials to deliver us from the attachments that enslave us to misapprehension. It is the thing that observes and wills.

Significantly, one measure of our reliable grasp of reality is that our perceptions conform to others understanding. We talk and relate with others and we understand each other. We can work and play together. That’s an agreed upon and workable reality. We also know when others aren’t processing reality clearly like the mentally disabled.  

The mind is central. Contemporary science has spent a great deal of effort to argue that mind emerges from the brain or the mind is simply the brain. One challenge to the centrality of the mind is actually the one I just brought up; the mind malfunctions. Injure one part of the brain and individual’s cognitive functions can fail. A person with damage to the Wernicke’s area of the brain, an aphasia, may no longer understand spoken speech but can still read, for example. So the physical clearly impedes on the mental. And we’ve seen where dementia will eventually rob an individual’s ability to communicate. They become nonresponsive. This can occur with the mentally insane as well.

But the mind or the domain-general part of the brain (physicalists use this jargon to stand in for the term mind) can retrain the brain as well. This is called Plasticity. Blind people can begin to use the part of the brain ordinarily assigned to sight for location awareness and hearing. Blind Sight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see. Science has determined that Blind Sight employs two areas of the brain that work in conjunction with the V1, which is damaged in the blind, to provide an awareness of objects not visually perceived.

Even more dramatic, someone experiencing repeated, life impairing epileptic seizures has had one of the hemi-spheres of their brain removed.  Extensive training can allow them to regain virtually all the functions that two hemispheres do. This raises questions about the standard narrative that there are areas assigned to the brain over evolutionary time.  As an addition to any evolutionary adaptation, we civilized people RETRAIN the speaking site of the brain, named Broca’s area to connect to the Visual Word Form (VWF) area of the brain, when reading is taught. The brain is rewired at under our training. This is actual modification of the neurons in the brain from repeated mental exercise to support activity of reading. So we are consciously changing our brains, begging the question what area of the brain does this? Ah, yes, that domain general, according to the neuroscientists (as for me, the “Mind”).

Science is still seeking answers about conscious brain activity. They have yet to determine conclusively, relying solely on various brain scanning technologies, if a person is unconscious or not. Most generally they have to check other vital indicators to know for sure. Therefore, physical brain dysfunction correlates with mental disability but does that prove the brain and mind are one? When the brain stops working, the person dies. That’s pretty conclusive one would argue. But I would hazard the brain fills the function of a filter rather than the source of all mental activity. I’ll pursue that line of thinking in a later writings.

Much has been done with brain scans. They point to electrical activity in one area of the brain being correlated with various mental activities such as speech (Broca’s area) or high level cognitive thought (cerebral cortex) or Wernicke area of language comprehension.  But truth be known, science is far from solving the “binding problem”. Under what process does the brain integrate our perceptions of smell and sight and cognitive thought and memory and self-awareness? Currently, under reductionist physicality, synapses fire in the brain in various areas, but only in a dim way does it provides clues to the nuanced sophistication that is our mind. There’s no “movie screen” which projects what we perceive that appears in the brain. Memory is stored all over the brain and parts of the brain co-reference each other. Language can start in one area affect another and the affected area can affect the original area. There’s really no area where the binding or integrating occurs, which leads some scientists to arrive at the obviously rash conclusion that consciousness is an illusion and it doesn’t really exist.

 Other oddities of the brain present themselves. How we can influence seriously basic bodily functions like our blood pressure (Oh my god, they just stuck a needle in my arm to draw blood…faint!) or heal ourselves with placebos (medicines in tests have to be more effective than the pill)? Where is the decision making area of the brain that decides to generate healing or cause a catastrophic drop in our blood pressure? These are attributed to domain-general activity, which I call once again the “Mind”.

Even thoughts, so real and intimate to us, are a mystery to science.  There’s no scientific way to record them beyond the obvious…someone tells you what they are thinking. No amount of measuring the areas of electrical activity in the brain or blood flow even by a magnetoencephalography (MEG), a super-cooled magnet, which can measure activity in a few thousand neurons, will get you to capture an actual thought.

Physicalism has no or little room for mental processes beyond the brain. But as I’ve argued the fundamental foundation of the observable reality is immaterial. Common understanding is that immaterial means nonexistence, but Quantum Physics contradicts this common conclusion. Matter prior to observation lacks spatial dimensions or mass or time; that is to say it is in a state of immateriality. In contradiction to Naïve Realism thinking there are no tiny particles of atomized matter orbiting the atom. The phenomena of the atom need to be observed, and upon measuring we detect real material particles, not figments of our mind.   

Thus the idea of an immaterial mind that inhabits the brain and thus the Matrix is far more reasonable then attempting to make sense of the Classical paradigm of naïve realism; meaning to say there’s independent reality aside from our observing it. The idea proposed there is a Reality composed of matter and forces acting on them and so the guess is that the brain must possess something like circuitry of a computer. It’s far more reasonable to posit an immaterial brain employing the wired circuitry of the brain to explain brain function. To gauge the “Quantum processing” power of the brain, one can look at an experiment by a Japanese Supercomputer in 2013 capable of processing 10 Quadrillion calculations a second. It mimicked one second of human brain activity and it took 40 minutes. The brain is certainly doing something far more powerful than a mere computer network.

Dr. David Chalmers, a Physicalist, denies the existence of the mind. Everyone including Chalmers, I would say, perceives the presence of a mind. However, since reductionist materialism can only recognize the wiring of the brain, the synapses and electrical impulses, the “illusion” of the mind is deemed spandrel, attractive add-on. The mind is deemed simply an illusionary add-on to the workings of the brain, emergent from the brain. Physicalist science has no explanation for consciousness so it doesn’t exist. It’s like looking at a computer’s electrical activity and its circuitry to explain the output of the computer without understanding its software.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Fundamentally, the world is immaterial as I repeatedly argue; just as our mind is substantially immaterial. And Quantum physics demonstrates the fundamental property of matter is immaterial. What we see appears real, solid and substantial. This is practically true but essentially in error. It’s only our measuring and observation that collapses the Schrödinger wave function. The observer participates with reality, if you will.

                                                                                                              

The Theory of Relativity, which began the shaking of the foundations of science at the beginning of the 20^th century, rattles our common sense world. Time slows down and extension shortens with velocity, astoundingly. But light speed remains constant. This certainly belies common sense.

The building blocks of the matter are fungible. One particle can take the place of another. A proton can be substituted for another proton or neutron for neutron. Those could be considered the pixels of the Simulation. And pixels can’t be examined intimately. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainly explains that either location or motion can be measured but not both. The fundamentals of the universe are exasperatingly elusive.

The fact is our minds are immaterial, while matter is fundamentally immaterial. All is mental in a manner of speaking and in one way the world is in our mind, or arises in our observation since we have no other way to know the world, as a sophist might suppose. But we can’t control the environment around us. And so we begin to realize that phenomena arise similarly to a Virtual reality generator of a SIM.

The Simulation only generates reality as we observe it, much like a video game where the room or scene is produced as we engage the game. This is an illustration of the Matrix, which raises another question re: the Matrix. Who runs the Simulation ? Aliens of vast intelligence? Occam’s razor would lead you to the conclusion that our reality is generated by a vast intelligence, far greater than our own. And that intelligence wouldn’t need a virtual reality simulator but operations that are simply ideas. These ideas would be produced in the Mind of a vast intelligence, something immaterial beyond space, time, mass. Ideas akin to magic. Plop a caveman into our society he would liken it to something that was inhabited by magicians. The powers of a Supreme Being would appear to us In the Matrix like actual reality. You might say this is a SIM so powerful it has haptic abilities, pressure, tactile sensing and smell and substance not just extension.

And as far as we know there’s no simulated reality unless we observe it, yet phenomena change and grow and decay without us. Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) in response to John Locke’s Primary and Secondary characteristics of matter argued for the mind observing the ideas of God, as fundamental. These ideas upon our observations produced the phenomena we experience. He reasoned that aside from the Secondary qualities of extension and color and weight and dimension, there’s not much left. So phenomena are something the observer perceives. Not wishing to be criticized for being a Sophist (A World simply being figment of our mental imaginings), God is seen to maintain the ideas that generate our phenomena. Knowing, as I have repeatedly stated, the world goes on without us. Berkeley would argue we can’t know if there is a world without us, the perceiver but trees bloom and become green and then change color and lose their leaves.  The world doesn’t bend to our wishes. Other people don’t kowtow to our wishes.

Berkeley would sound rather fanciful, if he wasn’t in a long tradition of thinkers looking at the world as mental. St. Gregory of Nyssa contended that God was in all and by all things, like water in a sponge, if you will, and understood ideas in the Mind of God to be what were said to be the Platonic forms. This is another way of saying the Divine runs the Matrix. Earlier Plato narrated his Allegory of the Caves; which suggested we are deluded in thinking the shadows we see are the truly real thing, in reality if one is properly enlightened, outside the confines of the cave we could perceive the substantial reality. For that matter there’s an extensive Eastern Tradition of Hinduism and Buddhism that denotes the material world as a veil of delusion; I’ll leave it to someone else to carry the argument to that extent.

Despite my rambling about, there’s good reason to suppose we might best be described as avatars in a Matrix. I would like to think the world we inhabit notwithstanding its tragedy and suffering and disaster is run by a Divine Being who ultimately in His Omniscience, knows what he’s doing.  Doesn’t mean I don’t question circumstances. I’m pretty sure He has a sense of humor. Things don’t always make sense, do they?

Combining the insights of Quantum Physics and the foundation shaking implications of Relativity with the rich Idealist tradition, and realizing the surprising congruences  between Simulation (VR) and the world described by the New Physics gets you to immaterial Mind as fundamental. 

The Matrix: Clues from Quantum Physics

Brian Whitworth, a physicist from New Zealand, noticed similarities between the quirkiness of Quantum physics and virtual reality, simulations, holographs and or video games: Gameboy, Nintendo, and such. He wrote a short monograph called “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” that highlights similarities between Quantum behavior and VR.

Here are several strange observations made over the century or so, that threw over standard Newtonian physics.

Gravity slows time.

Gravity curves space.

Speed slows time.

Speed increases space.

Speed of light has a governor or limit.

Faster than light reactions occur between entangled particles.

Two slit experiment demonstrates the presence of an electromagnetic particle in two places at once.

Radiative decay like gamma radiation occurs randomly with no known cause.

All of this and more befuddle physicists and have for a century.

I spoke about much of this weirdness in my last blog. I left the reader only a hint that Virtual Reality like the Matrix, the movie, was a proposal a few current physicists have begun to ponder that seems to best to reflect this strangeness.

Let’s lay out the case for a correspondence between VR and the Quantum physics.

1)      The Big Bang singularity is a beginning out of nothing. A VR simulation begins from nothing.

2)      Universe appears to have a Maximum processing rate. Screen refresh has a fixed allocated speed.

“The maximum speed a pixel in a virtual reality game can cross a screen is limited by the processing capacity of the computer running it. In general, a virtual world’s maximum event rate is fixed by the allocated processing capacity. In our world, the fixed maximum that comes to mind is the speed of light. That there is an absolute maximum speed could reflect a maximum information processing rate…”*

3)      The world appears pixelated, as Virtual Reality would be. There are limits to how closely we can observe the universe. In the subatomic particle world at the electromagnetic level Heisenberg Uncertainty is encountered. Only location alone or mass alone can be determined but not both together. The world is fuzzy or composed of packets, quantized.

4)      The world is “nonspatial” or as physicists like to term it, nonlocal. In VR no location is any further from another location to speak of, just one item on a screen. Nonlocality refers to the phenomenon of entanglement referred in the last blog. Observation on one entangled particle correlates to the other entangled particle across space regardless of distance, disregarding the speed of light, the presumed speed governor of the universe. Since a location on Virtual Reality display is determined by processing parameters, display pixels can be correlated.

5)      Crazy processing load effects are observed as in VR. If a computer has many demands a video may play slower than usual. A large body in space… “may constitute a high processing demand, so a massive body could slow down the information processing of space-time, causing space to ‘curve’ and time to slow. Likewise, if faster movement requires more processing, speeds near light speed could affect space/time, causing time to “dilate” and space to extend. Relativity effects could then arise from local processing overloads.”*

6)      There is surprising Algorithmic simplicity; mathematical laws surprisingly describe the scientific laws of the universe. “If the world arises from finite information processing, it is necessary to keep frequent calculations simple. Indeed the core mathematical laws that describe our world are surprisingly simple: ‘The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.’** In VR theory physical laws are simple because they must actually be calculated.”*

7)      Complementary uncertainty is a fact of reality. VR only calculates screens when viewed. VR displays either position or momentum for a particular memory location. But doesn’t display the entire game universe at once only that which is being interacted with.

8)      Fungible elements compose the phenomenon of the universe. One photon or electron is identical to another just like a dot on the screen of a video game. Of course this is an infinitely more sophisticated one.

9)      Teleportation has been observed. Quantum particles can “tunnel”, suddenly appearing beyond a barrier they cannot cross, like a coin in a sealed glass bottle suddenly appearing outside it.

There is far, far more to investigate about these similarities and correspondences. And there is great opposition by the majority of the physicists frankly and understandably so. The common understanding is reality is out there and we sense it intuitively. It’s substantial and real. It has real extension or space and mass or substantiality. It certainly seems this way no matter how we look at it, at least us in the West. Quantum Physics contradicts common sense, of course.

There have been cultures that didn’t take that view, mostly Eastern. The observable world was impermanent and perishable and transitory, the Maya. An illusion that was a façade behind which represented the Unity, the Mind of God. And not only in the East, as early as Plato and before the pre-Socratics, the argument was there existed a reality beyond the observable, called the Universals according to Plato. Universals were immaterial, eternal foundations of the world that represented the Ideal of the perishable and transitory matter. The primary example of a Universal was a number, eternal and immaterial. Beyond the observable. Where did the number reside? It existed before you thought of it, and it will exist after you’re long gone to contemplate it. So if there were no humanity to think of numbers or symbols, there would remain the reality and truth of numbers. They are not an illusion.

Matter on the other hand is always in a process of transforming; it is argued. The chair rots and decays and breaks into fragments and given enough time becomes soil. We too will die and decay and go back into the ground eventually. The Universal ideal of the chair, the symbol of the chair, is real and is eternal or at least according to Plato. As well as the part of us that shares in the eternal and perfect goes on forever.

Western Science has pursued the truth of the foundation of matter for centuries. It has delved and searched and investigated and pried apart the tiniest of pieces of matter. One of the first to position fundamental matter was Democritus (460-370B.C), a contemporary of Plato. He posited the fundamental nature of matter were tiny atoms, operated upon by natural forces. He was a pupil of Leucippus of the early 5^th Century B.C., who held similar views. Tiny little particles bouncing around were the nature of matter. This is really the standard view of matter even in our day.

Discoveries in quantum physics placed great uncertainty into this view. Scientists remain perplexed as to what to make of it. Nothing has really replaced this idea of “solid” matter being fundamental in the century that’s transpired. Einstein’s Relativity and Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty (surprising conclusion that electromagnetic phenomenon has indeterminacy of either location or movement) poked holes in the standard view of reality. The idea that there’s substantial matter out “there” hasn’t died. It’s similar to the retort, “I’m pounding on this solid desk…of course there’s a reality out there.”

The inescapable conclusion nonetheless one is drawn to: the fundamental basis of matter is immaterial; fundamentals of observable phenomenon are immaterial. And much like Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) proposed three hundred years ago, we’re in a world of immaterial ideas, real but a fundamental reality beyond space, time and extension engendered by a Supreme Intelligence. Absent perceived qualities what is matter? Take away measured or perceived qualities of an object, the color, the extension, the weight, what do you have? Berkeley would argue nothing.

There have been other Idealists, Plato I’ve mentioned but Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and his elaborate Monadology (a complex system of immaterial bodies that comprise matter) is another. It’s been a decidedly minority view but longstanding. The consensus of science is to dispute this view point.

Most germane are the revelations of Quantum Physics that demonstrate absence of extension (spatial dimension) and movement and time prior to observation. This state is called Hilbert Space representing state of matter prior to the collapse of the Schrodinger Wave Function. Prior to the “collapse” or observation the particle is only a probability with the likelihood of location that lacks determinacy.

If you concede there’s a Matrix, the question becomes, who’s running it? For me that’s straight forward. Something or someone with a vast intelligence operates the Virtual Reality with haptic features. An hyper-techno enhanced VR appliance. Could there be anyone or thing that intelligent in the universe?

And that begs the Ontological question. Does there exist the possibility of an intelligence greater than yours? Maybe an alien intelligence, who evolved a billion years before us? Or just a hundred years before us?  Whose technology is such it appears to be magic? How about the possibility of an infinitely powerful, all-knowing, immortal intelligence? The existence of perfection? Can you recognize the possibility? Of course.

In conclusion science has searched for the foundational, fundamental building block of matter only to discover a large measure of mystery to say the least. There wasn’t the every so tiny particles that interacted with each other that Democritus posited, after matter had been halved and split and divided and partitioned ad infinitum. Tiny pool balls universe. What they found was a bizarre, nonsensical world. An immaterial world best described as Virtual Reality as in the Matrix or Video Game, an Observer in a immaterial world of simulation.

Much of what I’ve written re: Quantum Physics and its correspondence to VR is a re-capitulation of the referenced monograph by Brian Whitworth.

*Brian Whitworth, “Physical World as a Virtual Reality” (2006)

**Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (1960)

The Matrix: Introduction to Quantum Weirdness

Could the reality we experience be a simulation like the Matrix?  Bishop Berkeley in his philosophical writings proposed a scenario three hundred years ago reminiscent of a Matrix, divinely upheld. Recent disclosures of Quantum physics have to come to strongly suggest something very similar.

The implications of Quantum physics have baffled physicists for a century. Science, rooted in the universe of Newton and his “billiard balls striking one another” universe of Classic Realism, showed all phenomena could be explained and predicted by natural forces working on matter. There is little necessity for a hypothesis like an Almighty God or any god for that matter. A universe runs like clockwork in this scenario.

In conjunction with that by the 20^th Century the universe was deemed to vast and eternal. Great balls of gas swirling in immense eons of time began to form a solar system and a sun with planets. If there was a God, he indeed was far removed. Earth was dethroned from being the center of the universe and eventually the image of man encountered the same denigration to a primate with elevated problem-solving skills.

In the late 19^th century science began to think it had pretty much everything about the universe explained. There was one tiny anomaly, black body radiation conundrum. That’s where solid objects, when heated, begin to glow red, then orange, yellow, white and blue. Under classical physics as an object, say iron, was heated the radiation was expected to increase incrementally in intensity with gradually shorter wave lengths. However at certain elevated temperature (5000k) suddenly the radiation intensity was shown to collapse inexplicably.

The search for an answer shook the foundations of Classical Physics itself, which envisioned the universe composed of solid, real particles being operated on by forces. And that’s the common popular understanding of world even today.

Max Planck devised a mathematical formula that formalized the observed Black Body phenomena; he was not sure exactly why it should. The best he could surmise is that light was emitted in packets or quanta, not in continuous graduations of energy.

It was discovered that speed of light was constant under a Michelson and Morley led experiment in 1887. The consensus of science at the time that light propagated itself in space through a medium called ether, like a wave through water. Surprisingly, no matter which way Michelson and Morley pointed their detectors whether forward the earth’s orbit, where speed of light should be faster, or behind earth’s orbit, where light should be slower, the speed of light remained 300k km per second, constant.

The assumption about the speed of light was similar to behavior on a moving walkway at the airport, when you walk with the walkway; your speed is added to the speed of the conveyor and vise-a-versa. With light the speed was constant no matter which way the detectors were pointed.  Idea of ether that 97% of scientists believed was discounted; once again in science consensus doesn’t account for much.

Some time thereafter, Einstein arrived at the astonishing counterintuitive conclusion termed Relativity that connected time, space and light in a way that belied common sense; physics began to get real quirky.

Physicists scratched their heads at a Universe in which the speed of Light has limits to it and attempts to increase our speed slows time and increases mass. What kind of universe did we inhabit? Science, oddly enough, began to lose ability to formulate answers.

But that was just the beginning of the peculiarity it turned out. Science was studying atomic and sub-atomic behavior at the same time as the cosmos. This study revealed that photons acted like waves when sent towards a two slit screen. The waves of light appeared to crest and cancel each other just as ocean waves do; an interference pattern of vertical bands of light and darkness appear on a surface.  Oddly enough other electromagnetic particles like electrons behave in the same way; they create interference patterns like a wave would.

Scientists were baffled by this wave behavior in electrons. They set up a detector behind one of the slits and sent just ONE electron towards the slits. Amazingly, upon detection the electron reveals itself as a PARTICLE. The electron is seen passing through one or the other slit, just as a Particle would do. Without observation the electron behaves like a WAVE and demonstrates an interference pattern of vertical bands of light and dark.

Prior to this observation what is deemed a particle is what physicists call a superposition, neither wave nor particle. It is the observation that determines the reality of the event. The so-called particle is everywhere and nowhere in Hilbert space, a vectored potentiality, until observed.

Additional craziness was encountered upon the discovery of entangled particles, a pair of particles generated sharing spatial proximity creating a correlated dependent quantum state. When separated, distance between them doesn’t preclude them from acting in conjunction. When one is observed, the other particle behaves accordingly. It’s as if they knew what the other had done. They were connected somehow. Einstein argued mightily against the idea that the particles were connected mysteriously at the time of the observation. His paper with Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) in 1935 proposed that there were hidden properties at the time of the initial creation of the entanglement that caused them to be correlated. Some thirty years later this was disproven by an Irish Physicist Stewart Bell in 1964.

Added to entanglement, Heisenberg presented his Principle of Uncertainty in 1927 regarding the subatomic world. Movement or position could be ascertained but not both. The micro world was fuzzy. Measurement of the velocity of a subatomic particle, such as an electron, alters it, so that a simultaneous measurement of its position is impermissible. This again makes little sense in a matter and energy world, where one billiard ball strikes another in a predictable manner.  

The Quantum world was strange indeed. There’s inexplicably a limit on the speed of light. Electrons and such can’t be determinately measured. Entangled particles can work together violating the speed of light.  A physicist might say if you claim you understand Quantum physics, you haven’t grasped its weirdness.

Quantum physicists generally throw their hands up in the fact of these puzzles; they tout the predictive power of what is termed the “Standard Model” of quantum physics with its milieu of particles, anti-matter, quarks (postulated but unobserved) and such. But the quirky, weirdness, aforementioned, they basically got nothing. The multi-verse hypothesis has become somewhat popular but it’s first unobserved and widely speculative.

At the beginning of the 21^st    century Quantum physicists began to formulate hypothetical scenarios that questioned Classic realism; a foundation science has been based on for centuries. Could we be immersed in a simulation and like fish swimming in the ocean not sense the water? In some sense the ancient Prophet encounters the Beyond in the Presence of God. Plato wrote about the Allegory of the Cave and the reality outside it. The person in a near death experience is convinced that they have chanced upon a reality far more substantial than we experience here. Like Neo in the Matrix, who becomes unplugged and discovers he was in an alien simulation. I’ll look to see how the Quantum physicist begins to uncover the clues of a deeply hidden simulation.

Modern Buddhism: Surprising Origins

Modern Buddhism is viewed as a religion (in the West) in which you really don’t have to believe in anything in particular or follow any strict rules. Surprisingly, Modern Buddhism has as much to owe to European Enlightenment as Buddha’s enlightenment. In many respects Modern Buddhism is quite distinct from what traditional Buddhism has meant throughout its long and varied history. It is in fact a new form of Buddhism, purged of mythological elements and “superstitious cultural accretions”^*. This Western Buddhism involves few rituals, de-emphasizes the miracles and supernatural events depicted in Buddhist literature, disposes of image worship and stresses compatibility with scientific and democratic ideals.*

Let me interject to say this is not meant to be a derogatory polemic against Buddhism, which has much to value it but a corrective to those that in the West that encounter Buddhism.

To continue some have termed this modern variation Protestant Buddhism, much as Protestants threw over much of the ritual and sacramental elements of the ancient traditional Christian faiths, practiced in Roman, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Catholics. The ornate churches were made austere and priestly robes removed. They nearly eradicated or demystified the transcendent rituals like the Eucharist and anointing. The iconostasis or rood screen was removed, separating representation of the Holy of Holies (where the mystery of the Eucharist is performed) from the nave. The genuflections as in crossing oneself, prostrations, kneeling and were banned as well. Confessional to the spiritual Father was eliminated, as well. Traditional Buddhism in Asia has been practiced with similar mystically imbued religious rubrics.

Traditional Buddhism wasn’t meant to be transmitted by someone visiting a local book store and perusing a book on Buddhism. A person studied under a spiritual teacher; to read the sutras without a spiritual guide would be deemed folly. It would have occurred to no one to pick up a book and try to understand it for themselves.  And one must remember the population was largely illiterate.

Native Buddhism encountered Theosophy, an eclectic philosophical system advocating the benefits of meditation to attain a transcendent spiritual state. Theosophy originated in the United States in the late 19^th Century under Helena Blavatsky and Henry Scott Olcott. It was influenced by their idea of what constituted the essence of Eastern Asian Religions, Neoplatonism, and included occult elements as well. In Ceylon Theosophy had a big influence on Buddhism, setting up schools and rediscovering ancient Sanskrit Buddhist texts. Curiously Theosophical founders ignored the living tradition of Buddhism that they encountered, other than to note its alleged corrupted state.

Much of the impetus for “reform” was Buddhism’s response to colonialism and missionary outreach. Buddhists began to respond with a digestible brand of its spiritual message. Elsewhere, D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) was an influential Japanese popularizer of Buddhism in its Modern more accessible variety. Although not a Zen priest himself, we learned of Japanese Zen Buddhism’s quizzical Koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” A novitiate would be presented with a series of these impenetrable queries. He incorporated American transcendentalist themes of returning to nature and living a simpler less commercial and acquisitive lifestyle. The emphasis here is a sudden, revelatory awaking of Buddha consciousness, the direct encounter with the divine, if you will permit.

The Vipassana movement, popularizing Theravada Buddhism, founded in part by Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982), a Burmese monk, focused on meditation with a diminution of traditional merit making efforts(karma related), chanting, ritual and devotion. He among other advocates of modern Buddhism sees the deinstitutionalized and detraditionalized meditation.

The truth is that the type of awakening the amateurs seek lacks much of the rigor required for such an elevated goal. The guidance of a master accompanied by exhaustive works of meditation, asceticism, prayer and devotion in an ancient religious tradition are lacking; according to traditional Buddhism it’s not easy to attain Buddha consciousness.

By the 10th century vipassana was no longer practiced in the Theravada tradition, due to the belief that Buddhism had degenerated, and that liberation was no longer attainable until the coming of a future Buddha; that is to say Theravada Buddhism practiced in Southeast Asia ceased efforts of attaining the level of Buddha Consciousness well over a thousand years ago until a revival in the early 19^th century.

These modern attempts at striving for an awakening similar to Buddha consciousness have their psychological and emotional benefits. Buddha has a heritage of advocating strong ethical behavior.  Conforming to the Eight Fold path leads to virtuous living. But it’s the meditation that is foremost; the effort to receive an experience of monitoring their psycho-mental states with a goal of eventually awakening into Buddha Consciousness that Modern Buddhism extols.

I am sorry that Christians, namely the Eastern Orthodox, haven’t presented their mystical traditions to a wider audience. Eastern Orthodox have a nearly two millennium tradition of monastic life populated by numerous Saints, some of whom are said to have attained the outpouring of God’s Uncreated energies, predicated on “watchfulness” and “stillness” of the heart. Saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) advocated such a spiritual journey; this meditative method of prayer is termed Hesychasm, designated as such by the Greek word for stillness.  This life offers the possibility of an encounter a “direct and unmitigated and individual experience of the Divine”*; this is fully within the religious tradition of the Church.

I must note that in contrast to Buddhism and Hinduism, there’s no belief that the Self dies or becomes subsumed with the One. Nonetheless one can be fully imbued with God’s Grace in a state of sinlessness; this path of greater holiness leading to salvation in cooperation with God’s Grace is called theosis. Any direct encounter with God’s Energies is purely dependent on God’s Mercy. I must say far more emphasis is placed on obtaining the virtues through ascetic struggles, observance of liturgical cycles, daily prayer and confession of sin than anticipation of some transcendent encounter with the Divine.

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The Buddhism is understood by the West as a rational philosophy that contains a practical spiritual technique that “requires neither belief nor a particular worldview”*; that’s touted to be reminiscent of empirical and pragmatic methods employed in science. This process of meditation has been likened to a scientific method of investigation into ones psycho-emotional state. And it sets the dead ritual and superstition of any traditional religion aside in its deeper scientific quest for truth about our interior. Modern Buddhism strives for a direct and unmitigated and individual experience of the transcendent, however outside the milieu of traditional Buddhism. 

Modern Buddhism strives to extinguish the residual existence that’s subject to reincarnation; restated, nirvana is the process of blowing out of the candle of the spiritual substance that might ever become reborn. Both Hinduism and Buddhism wish to transcend the Self, the Me-ness.  The goal is towards cessation of existence of the individual Self and avoidance of rebirth.

This has some correlation with Modern science’s skepticism towards the existence of mind. Brain and it’s wiring and synapses, evoked by brain scans, are the sole repository of our personhood, science makes claim. The illusion of Mind is emergent from that complex wiring of the brain; we just mistakenly think the Self is separate from the wiring; it’s affirmed by modern scientific discoveries. The supernatural or mythical is downplayed in the view of Modern Buddhism. Buddhism is scientific discovery of the mind, or rather psychological processes of the brain.

“As a spiritual-mystical technique that aspires to a universal truth transcending religious dogma, in some cases it breaks away from the ‘religion’ of Buddhism and is seen as a path, transcending all religions, to an alleged truth at their core. As an instrument for ascertaining ‘natural laws’ within the mind, it becomes a technique for empirical inquiry. As a tool for taming negative emotions and gaining control over the mind, it is a therapeutic tool…”*

One last contrast, Buddhism looks to end rebirth; this contrasts to the Christian idea that despite the universe being flawed due to our own choices, a nonetheless divine creation. One’s fondest wish is to be delivered from this despoiled reality to enter God’s eternal domicile; we are not extinguished, because we are independent minds beholden to a far greater Mind. As far as that’ concerned, Hinduism wants the droplet of the wave (the self) to be reunited with the ocean (the Great Mind).  Christians want to dwell as individuals with the Divine Being.

*Generous borrowings have been made from David L. McMahan’s fine book, The Making of Modern Buddhism.  I highly recommend it, as an exposition on the nature of Modern Buddhism.

Historic Reliability of the Gospels

Are the Gospels Reliable History? A Response to Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman is a Biblical scholar with the University of North Carolina and author of several bestselling books dismissing the Gospels as reliable history, rather better described as folk tales: written to the needs of a 1^st Century Christian faith community not according to accurate history. He adheres to the ideas of Form critics, who believe the Gospels are composed of vignettes, stories or what is termed pericopes. These pericopes were passed down through the generations and altered to suit the needs of the faith community.  Thus they give a poor account of history.  He will also maintain that the Gospels were not written by apostles, implying the authors had a tenuous connection at best with the real events of Jesus life.

Mr. Ehrman belies his prejudices by pushing the idea that the Gnostic gospels, equally worthy to be included in the Bible canon, were excluded in the book Lost Scriptures: Books that didn’t make it into New Testament.  Of course there is much to support that the Gnostic gospels like the recently discovered Gospel of Judas were 2^nd century or later Gnostic concoctions. The inclusion within a Biblical canon would have violated apostolic parameters; that is writings needed to conform to the modes of thinking of the 1^st century Christianity, a Jewish sect initially and be composed within the first century. Neither of these criteria were met. The world view of the Gospel of Judas is decidedly opposed to that of the accepted Gospels. Jesus is described in a Docetist way; the corporeal body of Jesus was an illusion and his crucifixion simply a sham. The real Truth about Jesus was given to only a select few in this case just to Judas. Docetism satisfies the worldview of the Greeks, who saw the created earth as something of a mistake, created by the demi-urge. The demi-urge was a lower god than the Divine One, the unchanging deity self- contained spirit who had no need to create. True holiness and sanctity needed to be completely otherworldly and spiritual.  This earthly existence was something to escape. Ehrman insists that by something of akin to a conspiracy proto-Orthodoxy kept the books from being included, as they should be.

Mr. Ehrman skepticism even goes to extant to ponder the existence of Jesus Christ. Mr. Ehrman decides the question in favor of His existence; thankfully, in his book Did Jesus Exist?  I can say I was quite relieved that now with Mr. Ehrman’s imprimatur I can rest in the thought there was at least somebody in the 1^st Century Judea that went by the name of Jesus.  Wow, I was worried there for a while. Mohammed, Buddha, and Zoroaster among others would fail the same historical scrutiny. There is far more contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus than the aforementioned religious notables. And there are others outside the early Christian Faith community who confirm the existence of Jesus such as the Jewish Historian, Josephus and Roman historian Tacitus.

But I’m off point already. The question is the reliability of the Gospels. Mr. Ehrman is a proponent of the Form Criticism school as I said. Form criticism was introduced in the 1920’s by Rudolf Bultmann, a German Lutheran theologian. From the time of Jesus’s ministry it is said, tales arose and were disseminated much like the distorted messages created in the game of telephone (sometimes called the game of whispers) whereby the original message is completely lost by the time it reaches the person who originated the message. Such as “the bird flew the coup” becomes “Bill feeds a fool” or some silly such thing. It is proposed that the Gospels were produced by a religious community for their own purposes and can’t be regarded as accurate history. These corruptions are said to have easily happened since the faith communities were isolated spread across the Mediterranean basin.   The language, Greek, of the New Testament was not the language of Jesus and the first disciples, Aramaic. The writers of the Gospels were remote from the original sources, it’s said.

As evidence of the absence of complete historical veracity, they indicate ostensible irreconcilable differences in the Gospel accounts such as the different accounts in how Judas met his death. Was it by hanging or falling off a cliff and having his insides burst open, reported in Acts?  Or when did Jesus cleanse the Temple? The Gospel accounts vary. The Gospels Mark and Matthew say at the beginning of His ministry but Mark says Monday and Matthew Sunday. John records it at the end of His ministry. Granted, these seeming contradictions were known from the beginning of the Early Church. And they have been harmonized within the tradition. The first harmonized Gospel was in the 2^nd Century. The Early Church was cognizant of the seeming contradictions and worked to reconcile them and had reason to keep all four Gospels.

The form critics have no interest in reconciling the differences in the Gospels, albeit the contradictions in many cases appear puzzling nonetheless. Basically the story of the life of Jesus, they claim, was completely open to interpretation and the several, largely separate faith communities altered their versions to suit which later became the four Gospels. Further there was no one Orthodox consensus at the time so each of the separate communities could put their spin the Gospels. Most importantly, the Gospels were compiled from these forms, discrete stories, folk tales if you will, related to the life of Jesus aggregated to become the particular Gospel account whether Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. That’s Bart Ehrman’s and the Jesus Seminar’s twist anyway. In other words, the events of life of Jesus Christ were not recorded faithfully, according to them.

It was put forward that stories about Jesus were circulating in the 1^st Century Christian community and Gospel writers, using Apostles names to title the works (pseudepigraphia), complied these separate stories, deemed forms or periscopes,  into the aforementioned literature. The assumption was the stories about Jesus said more to the Early Christian community than the events they were to have relayed. 

This is the real point. The authors of the Gospels claim to write history, based on eyewitness testimony. The Gospels, seeming contradictions or no, were written within the life times of the eyewitnesses of the incarnation of Jesus Christ; that is by A.D. 90. For example St. Paul records that the resurrected Jesus was seen by 500 witnesses, after visiting the 12 Apostles, then James, the brother of Jesus and all the other apostles of Christ (Corinthians 15: 5-7). Again, all of the Gospels were written within a span of time of the eyewitnesses. Luke, the Gospel writer, boldly claims that he is reporting the events as handed down to them by eyewitnesses present from the beginning of Jesus ministry (Luke 1: 1-4). And John in his Gospel claims to be an observer (John 19: 35 and John 21: 24). So the writers of the New Testament make very audacious allegations their purpose. They claim to write history not folk tales.

Since the 1920’s much has been revised in regards to how well oral tradition can be passed down the generations. A.B. Lord in his Singer of Tales relates how massive legendary sagas could be transmitted virtually intact using mnemonics. His main interest was the ancient legends like Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf, and studies of current Serbo-Croatian epic poems.

Jan Vansina in Oral Tradition as History describes how a pre-literate oral society can preserve history through faithful transmission from one generation to another. He discusses how in some societies transmission of oral history is much more than a game of telephone or whispers. Societies designate individuals and are given the grave responsibility to preserve the tradition virtually intact. Pre-literate societies in Africa and other places throughout the world were surveyed. In addition in many cases the audience in these societies could act as an audit, correcting the narrator. In the case of the author, this process took place over many generations, even hundreds of years. On the other hand the Gospel Accounts were transmitted over just one or two generations. Hence a process of faithfully passing extensive memories of the apostles, disciples and followers can easily be envisaged.

 Admittedly, memories can play tricks but the recall of essential dramatic, vivid events can be relied on, psychologists tell us, to allow retention of the fundamental meaning of an event. And as for the Gospels there was no long period of time in which these memories of Jesus’s life could have degraded into folk lore. For one the church was not completely isolated; the early Christian community maintained contacts. St. Paul, in his extensive travels about the Mediterranean world, reports he conferred back with the Apostles in Jerusalem. The Council at Jerusalem reported in Acts sends letters to sister churches, informing them of their decisions regarding the observance of Mosaic Law. The events of the history of the life of Jesus Christ could have been faithfully preserved. For example the Pharisees past down their law from one individual to another, faithfully expecting great efforts of memorization. Other cultures assigned select individuals, who were given ownership of the inheritance and committed to memory and are granted the responsibility to pass it on.

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There are four accounts of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, subsequent to Caesar gained sole control of the Roman Republic in A.D. 49. None agree on all the details. Which river represents the Rubicon is a guess. The Roman historian, Suetonius, wrote a history some 170 years later after the event. According to the view of form critics, I presume we must categorically conclude Caesar didn’t cross the Rubicon. The accounts are too confused and sources too distant from the event. The best explanation in this view would interpret the event was simply a fabrication to buttress the legitimacy of the Empire. Of course history tells us the crossing did occur and no one doubts it.

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I find the dramatic conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus highly significant.  Saul, soon to be renamed Paul, a persecutor of the early church, has an otherworldly vision of Jesus Christ. He describes it as being taken up to the 3^rd heaven, whether in the body or out he didn’t know. The 2^nd heaven was the abode of the sun, planet and stars, the 3^rd the dwelling place of God. This is obviously an out of body experience. This most influential conversion in world history is representative of a most fundamental spiritual reality. This experience has been repeated in the Saints many times in the last two millennia. Countless others down through the centuries Jews, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist have had visions of a transcendent Jesus and have been converted. This spiritual reality is really what the New Testament points to. It is not the focus of the New Testament. The history of the Life, Jesus Christ, that incorporates and yet transcends this world, is the focus of the New Testament. So in some way the Holy Scriptures of the Bible are a shadow of this aforementioned reality NOT the reality itself. I say this meaning that exclusive focus on the Holy Scriptures only gives an attenuated view of the truth of the Christianity.  

 Jesus Christ, God incarnate, came into this world to sanctify it. His crucifixion punctuates the idea that this world we experience is significant and real. The material corporeal world has meaning. Nonetheless this very real world is a holding place for a better world, the afterlife. This world is not our own. In modern Eastern lingo, this is without a doubt the lowest astral plane we will inhabit.

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Let me concede for one instance the Form Critics contention that the Early Christian community needed these otherworldly stories, eventually complied into Gospels to sustain the faith. Accurate history was not a high priority. This is NOT my contention but let’s go with that for a moment. I believe God continued to work through history through His Church. I know that’s a scary proposition considering all the numerous shenanigans the Church committed even up to today with the recent Priest scandals. But nonetheless in that light as in regards to the Early Christian community the essential truth of the events was maintained. The Holy Spirit worked through the Faith Community to arrive at the true meaning of Jesus. (See John 16:13. The Holy Spirit is promised to guide the Church going forward.)

Others, primarily Protestant Reformers, expelled tradition, personified by the apostate Church; that is God’s ability to work through his faith community to harbor His Truth, and instead found refuge in God’s Holy Scripture as the only authority. It is they who have the most difficulty when the Scriptures are called into question. It is largely their only anchor. They no longer have a faith community in which God graced with His Holy Spirit.

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There are many believers who adhere to the doctrine of inerrancy of the Bible including the New Testament, of course. The Bible is presented as being composed in a process of nearly auto-dictation and correct in every detail. It is my contention that the Bible is inerrant in its spiritual and theological message and accurate according to the essential historical details. It is inspired Holy Scripture but the contradictions present in the New Testament must to be harmonized. Inspiration means the writers were working with the Holy Spirit but not writing under some spell of divine mechanical dictation. Their writing, historically accurate, was composed in the spirit that conformed to the workings of the Holy Spirit within the 1^st Century Christian community.

The Christian Faith community bestows the Holy Scripture but in addition it has bestowed the work of the people within process of worship, that is the liturgy AND in addition the witness of the Saints as well. The Early Church granted apostolic sanction to the Gospels. There are other Gospels that came later that were rejected by the Early Church. Further, the Early Christian community gave us liturgical traditions that are imbued with the ability to empower the participants with God’s grace. The Church, as flawed as it is, was guided by the Holy Spirit down through the centuries (John 16: 13, 14) gives us the testimony of the Saints: many of whom have had the same transcendent experience as St. Paul. This outpouring of the Grace of God, accompanied by continues today.  See above about visions and visionaries.

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The real objection for the skeptics like Bart Ehrman is the presence of miracles in the Gospels. It’s a valid objection for an historian. In the Gospels we see people are miraculously brought back to life, healed and restored to sanity. We have bread multiplying to feed thousands and water becoming wine and Jesus calming storms and walking on water: a whole host of implausible, fantasy events. This can’t be history, it would be said. Real history is devoid of miracles, the skeptic alleges. Frankly, I admit that granting credence to the miraculous poses a challenge to credibility.  I wouldn’t automatically criticize someone who had questions about these types of implausible occurrences.

Even so, an All Mighty God could and can choose to transgress the ordinary course of nature or even yet seem to use natural processes to effect a miracle. Much impetus to medieval science was given by the desire to detect the presence of miracles in the natural world.  What unearthly power, intelligence, consciousness created the universe out of the singularity, a tiny infinitesimal point? Actually the presence of something called consciousness in the universe is a mystery. For that matter, if someone can actually believe in the multi-verse scenario, an entire universe popping into existence, then I don’t feel too silly admitting to a resurrection here and there, blind given sight, lame ability to walk, et cetera and God coming to earth as man: God’s incarnation through history.

Naturalism and Supernaturalism: Materialism and Intelligent Design

As I have written previously, the observable universe demonstrates design. This evokes a Grand Designer as the inference to the best explanation. That is in the presence of design, the existence of a designer is deemed as the best explanation among others. Materialists maintain the existence of the universe can be explained by evolutionary processes due to forces of nature working randomly to produce a universe that appears designed. The complexity of biological systems and the inherent fine tuning demonstrated in the universe that allowed for life has greatly reduced the potency of the materialist’s advocacy of evolution with its natural laws combined with randomness as the explanation of how the universe currently appears.

And yet the idea of an intervening creator, the Grand Designer, violates the naturalism that science is based. Since naturalism is seemingly jettisoned, the knee jerk reaction by the Scientific Materialist is to reject the critique of evolution and the hopeless implausibility of the presence of complexity by random processes, as exist in the cell.

Natural Philosophers, the term for scientists prior to the 19^th century, have taken several approaches to explain natural occurrences from Supernaturalism to Naturalism. The situation upon which the divine intervenes continually in nature is called Supernaturalism. Under this position God intervenes when wood starts to burn or winds blow or lightning strikes. God is the cause of all things and all observable events. A modern would rightfully deem this to be a primitive view, although the 18^th British Philosopher, George Berkeley, argued God wills us to experience matter. So it is not matter we experience but God working in the universe. Of course philosophically speaking there’s no way to tell the difference.

The Intelligent Designer hypothesis sees immanent design in the universe and presumes there must be a Grand Designer who intervened at some point or points in time in history of the cosmos. Naturalism presupposes that there are secondary causes set in motion at the inception of the universe, where a divine being (a position generally called Deism) or some primordial force caused these secondary forces to astir themselves. You must know that the prevalent view of many non-deistic natural philosophers including Aristotle was that the universe was eternal without origin.  Even as late as the Mid-20^th Century the Steady State theory of the cosmos was the dominant view, the term Big Bang being a pejorative term. Under Steady State the universe had no point of origin. Oops, here comes the Big Bang with its so called singularity an infinitely small point of origin. Virtually, all of the Christian natural philosophers in the past have been naturalists who saw God working in the common course of nature through secondary forces including Galileo.

I accept the Bible as a book of great spiritual wisdom. Yet, the Genesis creation account is best interpreted with the incorporation of scientific discoveries. The creation account is an accommodation to the audience to which it was written. With this in mind seven separate creation events over time has been proposed as a way to view this creation event not seven contiguous days. Adam and Eve represent genotypes or I prefer inhabitants of a specific location, one might call “paradise” from which they were expelled. Some have proposed the duration in paradise might have been in the time span of only one afternoon. This idyllic location, existing under God’s will, was subsequently swept away while the fallen natural earth we inhabit remained. God knew beforehand what the result of his test to Adam and Eve would be and the provident need for a means of salvation, through incarnation of a mediator.  

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Evolutionary processes do little to explain the rise of complex biological machines. There’s way too much information and complexity involved. Just like the tremendous amount of information that is contained in the DNA helix. Random selection could not conceivably build this. But the only force materialism employs is what Aristotle called the efficient cause. This is the one force that acts on others such as gravity or the force of expansion of gas in a vacuum.

Yet, Aristotle posited three other forces: Material, Formal and Final. Modern science dismissed these with the scientific revolution of the 17^th century. Francis Bacon wrote in his Advancement of Learning (1605) that natural science "doth make inquiry, and take consideration of the same natures : but how? Only as to the material and efficient causes of them, and not as to the forms.” Meaning to say science is meant to consider efficient causes not formal ones. Here scientific materialism fails.

The failure of materialism can be clearly demonstrated in amino acid folding. Amino acids in order to function, after RNA generates a proper sequence, need to have the correct folding or position. A force akin to Aristotle’s formal force can be detected in this folding, the possibilities of the arrangements of the amino acids are far too great to be explained by random mutation upon which an evolutionary advantage might be gained. I would propose that something like secondary formal causes acted to generate the hugely complex bio-mechanical system of life, set in motion by a purposeful divine being. Just as this divine being set in motion the efficient causes like gravity and the sub-atomic forces. In contrast to the ID model where God intervenes directly as an intelligent agent, these work to build the intricate biological machines. And Promissory Materialism can only propose a process of random forces acted on to provide an advantage to survival, which in many cases fall short of explanation. Or the promise of a not yet arrived at explanation in the future.  

Much like the just so stories offered regarding how life arose in a tidal pool with chemicals sloshing around for billions of years. Of course those chemicals didn’t have billions of years only millions of year after the earth cooled down.

 These formal causes can be seen at work in the construction and maintenance of basic cells. How these cells first came together again I posit a formal and material causes but can not rule out the direct act of a Grand Designer either, as the inference to the best explanation.

This Formal Force or Cause preserves naturalism; i.e. virtually all we experience is within the ordinary course of events and not an immediate divine intervention. One of the reasons that the Medievals studied nature was to attempt to discern the miracle from ordinary.  They believed that God constrains himself to work within what is considered ordinary means not miraculous ones.

Almighty God acts through the ordinary course of nature by secondary forces but this doesn’t preclude Him from intervening directly in the cosmos. “And on the Seventh Day God rested from all his work” (Genesis 2:2) is quoted to denote God set in motion secondary forces to maintain the universe.

The Intelligent Design advocate sees features like the bio-mechanics of the one cell organism that demonstrate the activity of design and intelligence and proposes that an intelligent power directly intervened to create it. The Promissory Materialists see the same bio-mechanical organisms packed with design and intelligent purpose and presume that we will discover eventually the process in which they were generated, despite the fact that the current explanation of random evolutionary forces explains nothing how these incredibly complex systems were generated. Promissory Materialists dismiss the intelligent design explanation as simply God in the gaps answer. Formerly, thunder and lightning was explained as God or Thor or some Divine power acting directly in nature. Science dismissed God’s interventions with natural explanation, thus the gap in natural explanation was closed so to speak.

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Materialism makes exaggerated claims about its explanatory ability and the eventuality it will explain all the fundamental truths. Its claim that it’s been right so far, is powerfully deceptive. Despite all we now know about things, there is a vast realm of what it doesn’t explain including the origin of life or the big bang or a whole host of events. Even the Cambrian explosion, whereby we seen rise of the invertebrates, remains a mystery 150 years after its discovery. The “binding” problem is unexplained; that is the feeling we all possess a unified self (only those that don’t are deemed insane or mentally disabled) that modern brain science tells us is an illusion. How did consciousness arise, since life is said to have arisen from unthinking primordial chemicals? Or is consciousness just an illusion like many brain expects seem to think? The instantaneous spooky action at a distance of related sub-atomic particles is a known physical event. But science lacks an explanation other than be termed simply a quantum event. This strange quantum “event” is unexplained by any known action of material forces such as gravity, the strong force, the weak force or electromagnetic processes.  The hypothetical quark of the sub-atomic particle is unseen and only guessed at.  The list goes on and on and on. Not that science hasn’t created numerous gadgets and thing-a-ma-gigies; those amazing technologies that affect our daily lives.

Plus the explanations change over time. Newtonian physics was to explain bodies in motion but then it needed to Einstein to posit relativity. In late 19^th century atoms are a kind of gooey raisin… no they’re made of composite particles which are made of composite particles. Oops! There are no particles just wave functions. Continents are stable. Wait a minute they move. The universe is steady and eternal; no it’s expanding and has an origin. The explanations keep changing; there seem to be in need of revision. Who’s to say in one hundred years what the universe will be said to be like? Having an iPod doesn’t mean you have the meaning of the universe. Science gives us useful explanations and control of the observable universe but not fundamental answers like how we behave and who we are or even what is the fundamental nature of the universe.

In response to the obvious design and purpose demonstrated in the universe, the fine tuning we see, an Anthropic principle was proposed: the universe happened as we see it because we are here to observe it. This is the shit happens explanation. When someone gets cancer, gets abandoned by spouse or lover, sees someone they love die or don’t get the research grant we were expecting, all of this can be termed shit happens… but even better than that we have universes pop out of nothing into existence every so often, it seems. That is out of the singularity comes the Big Bang. Poof! Pink Rabbit appears on my desk out of nothing…I mean an entire universe inhabited by conscious self-aware beings appears. An occurrence so wildly implausible it would be like winning the lotto 365 times in a row. If it were happen, somebody would begin to question, whether the lotto was rigged. Not our promissory materialists. Remember “shit happens”. Someone else has proposed it’s like a firing squad of 50 Sharpshooters at 20 paces bent upon my execution manage to miss me. Wow, that must have been my lucky day, nothing special there, one of these would say. An entire universe pops into existence. The “shit happens” explanation is old, Democritus and Epicurus philosophized we are simply a random assemblage of atoms. Does that make them right? No, because the dominant idea of the ancient world maintained there was purpose.

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 When we posit an intelligent agent acting immediately and directly as cause of events, we fall into the risk of having God act, when no other explanation is available, a God in the gaps explanation. Classic example is thunder. Thor’s hammer and all that. We currently have a far better understanding of the natural processes of thunder storms and no one believes its Thor’s hammer or God being angry.

Where’s God here we might ask? God constrains himself to working through secondary natural forces in the ordinary course of nature. I do not discount the possibility God, the grand designer of a masterfully designed mechanism like the cell, could have acted directly in the creation of cellular mechanics. But since the success of science providing understanding of natural occurrences, many scientists discount any explanation other than the standard evolutionary one, despite the complete absence of a process based in reality; the primal soup doesn’t count folks. Completely implausible. The inference to the best explanation becomes direct creation by a grand designer. Yet I propose a force set in motion by a Divine power that could have generated an irreducibly complex mechanism like the cell. This force could be deemed a formal force, something we see operating today in amino acid folding.

In addition the billiard ball universe, critiqued by David Hume in the 18^th century, miscarries when it meets the quantum world of the infinitely small. Note in the bizarre quantum world of subatomic particles, in what Einstein called spooky action at a distance, distant particles work in synchronization and can even be in two places at once like a wave. There are NO forces working on each other. There are no inherent variables present prior to the particles separating. But the particles, beyond space and time, work inexplicably in synchronization.

Promissory materialism based on random events subject to natural laws alone without purpose can’t explain a miraculously fine-tuned universe. Some have proposed the fatuous idea of the existence of trillions of multiple universes; we inhabit the one that “works”. It’s pure fancy, a theory without falsification or verification since the answer lies beyond the singularity, based on a world view that sees empirical science as the only truth. A truly unscientific idea.

The Genesis account in the Bible presumes that life makes sense and has purpose in the midst of our suffering; creation is good and there’s an eternal moral principle operating in the universe. Not dumb chance where shit just happens.  

On the Seventh Day God rested it says in Genesis. If God were to be acting in a direct and immediate manner the universe would have fallen apart upon God’s repose, but God set in motion natural forces, secondary forces. Science investigates these natural forces. Intelligent design purports to say that God intervened immediately and directly in creation in a supernatural way. I have no doubt that an Almighty God could do this and intervene but scientific analysis looks to natural forces and rejects supernatural explanations. Science has been very successful at arriving at natural solutions and dispelling supernatural ones. Nonetheless, despite what science claims it has been far from completely successful, as mentioned above with quantum mechanics and the origin and fabrication of highly complex bio-mechanics among others.

Thus I propose a secondary formal cause set in motion by a divine agent to explain natural occurrences that the “promissory materialism in the gaps” explanations fail to explain. This implies the universe has form and purpose, something materialists can’t abide by.