Recall that we began with a quotation from Immanuel Kant: he said that it was possible to experience God, but only if one already knew God. That raised the question as to how one should get to know God in the first place. As we have discovered, getting to know God is bound up with this recognition that our minds are not mere carbon copies of our physical selves in psychological form. In addition they carry the imprints God has added to our psyche – those features we would not have expected to find there if we were nothing more than self-replicating survival machines.
But does such an acceptance of God rest entirely on our interpretation of those characteristics of mental experience that were hard to account for otherwise? By no means. As Kant said, once one ‘knows’ God then it opens up the possibility of having experiences of him. This I interpret as meaning that not only are we able to learn of him from our inner mental life, we may also have experiences of God through life in general, and in particular through reflecting on the nature of our encounter with the physical world. Such external encounters provide confirmatory evidence for the kind of God who has made his presence known to us in our inner being.
Let me be clear. Earlier we came to the conclusion that an examination of the physical world does not lead to incontrovertible proof of God’s existence – the kind of proof that would satisfy a sceptic. That still stands. What we are now saying is that, setting aside the sceptical stance and adopting instead the approach of a believer – one who knows through introspection the kind of God we are dealing with – we are now in a position to view the world in a different light. In doing so, we find that our experiences of the physical world lend themselves to the interpretation that God is indeed revealing himself through that world. Earlier we saw how some people have tried, unsuccessfully, to find God in the gaps in our knowledge of the world. Now, by contrast, we seek him in what we do know about the world. We are asking whether the world betrays a veiled Presence. In other words, has God imprinted his characteristics on the physical world in much the same way as he has done on our minds? Does it resonate with the kind of God revealed in the otherness of the mind? Indeed, we study the world not just to enquire after confirmatory evidence for what we have already learned, but to see if it is able to deepen and enrich our understanding of God. It has also to be added that we need to check that there are no contraindications; that is to say, features about the world that contradict the view we have so far formed of the nature of God.
But before examining what kind of world we live in, we must first ask why there should be a world in the first place.
So far we have described God as the source of consciousness. Indeed, we have effectively defined God to be whatever is responsible for the phenomenon of consciousness. God is its Creator. That being so, when considering the physical world, it seems reasonable to conclude that, rather than postulating a second creative agency, the world also owes its existence to this Creator. We repeat: God is the Ground of All Being. This appears especially likely given that we know of the very close correlation between our mental experiences and what goes on in that part of the physical domain we identify with the brain.
But what motivated God to create the world in the first place? The answer lies in recalling how one of the unexpected features of our consciousness is the sense of fulfilment and pleasure we experience in creating something. As we saw, it might be through the production of a painting, the building of a piece of furniture, the making of a flower arrangement, the preparation of a special meal, the decoration of a room, the design of a garden or the birth of one’s child. From our own experience we learn that the urge to create goes far beyond the need to create objects useful for reproduction and survival. Much that we enjoy creating serves no utilitarian purpose.
Might we not, therefore, conclude from this that God himself probably has similar motives for creating something? Why did he go to all the bother of creating a universe? He found it fulfilling. And being the kind of God he is, he wanted us to share in that type of experience. That is why we ourselves get so much satisfaction from our own small forays into being creative.
Indeed, the matter goes deeper. There is a strand of modern theology that describes us humans as co-creators with God. When we look at the world we cannot help but recognize that all is not as it should be. In so many respects conditions in the world fall short of the ideal. It is unfinished business. We feel compelled to do our bit to build a better world. Believers and non-believers alike feel this compulsion; we are all made in God’s image. The difference is that religious people consciously believe they are working alongside their God in his continuing creative enterprise.
Closely allied to creativity, another feature of the otherness of the mind was the sense of purpose. Though there is nothing in our description of the workings of the physical world that requires us to introduce the notion of purposefulness – everything happening in a deterministic fashion – yet we feel that our lives are invested with a sense of aiming at chosen goals. Is this a clue that God has a sense of purpose?
We recall that the God we have come to know is primarily a God of love. But for love to be exercised there must be someone to love. Might that therefore be a further reason for God to create the world? It was not just about the satisfaction to be derived from the act of creating something. God wanted to create someone to love, namely ourselves and any other intelligent beings throughout the universe. The physical world was to be our home. And because he wanted to allow for the possibility of that love to be returned, he created us with minds that could love. That was his purpose – his overall aim.
His purposefulness manifests itself in another way. Once one accepts that there is a spiritual dimension, there comes the realization that life can have an overarching purpose. Not one of those purposes one has consciously decided for oneself, but one that has seemingly been imposed from beyond. Life assumes a certain pattern. I am sure most of us on occasion experience confusion about what is happening to us, especially if it involves suffering or loss. We ask why a supposedly good and benevolent God would allow such troubles to occur. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that one might come to recognize that these setbacks are part of a plan that works out well in the end. Yes, it is painful to go through a divorce, for instance, but it is only through that first-hand experience that one becomes sensitized as to how best to minister, on God’s behalf, to those who are going through the same trial. Time and again in the Bible we read how some called to be great prophets had not wanted to assume such a prominent and sometimes dangerous vocation. It was thrust upon them. Recall how Moses protested to God that he was not suited for such a role because he did not have the gift of persuasive speech. But he had to go through with it. He was an integral part of God’s plan for the Israelite people. Then there was the case of Jeremiah. God told him, ‘Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.’ Before he was even born! Jeremiah’s future was already mapped out for him. And in our own small way, we too can feel that we are being compelled to act in a manner that is counter-intuitive, but somehow does seem for the best in the end.
The believer accepts that this is further evidence that God has a purpose in mind for us. Like creativity, a sense of purpose is very much an integral characteristic of God. And in making us in his own image, he endowed us too with our individual capacity to live purposeful lives rather than live in a resigned state of helpless inevitability when faced with the spectre of determinism.
Closely allied to the notion of purpose is that of free will. There is no point in having a purpose unless one has the freedom to choose that aim for oneself, and the ability to work towards its accomplishment. When previously we were studying the contents of our minds, we noted that, among the features we would not have expected to find there if the conscious experience was merely that of a deterministic survival machine, was the conviction that we had free will. Treating this as an imprint from God we conclude that God himself is capable of making free choices – a conclusion that appears to be confirmed when recognizing that, where the creation of the physical universe was concerned, choices among various possible alternatives were needed. These included whether there should be a universe at all, what kind of universe it should be, and whether to include conscious living creatures.
So much for why there should be a world. Given that it exists and is the handiwork of God, we move on to study its characteristics. It is only reasonable to assume that features associated with the Creator might manifest themselves in what is being created. This is in much the same way as the characteristics of a painting often tell us something about the kind of person responsible for it. There is, for instance, a world of difference between the tortured nature of the works of Van Gogh, such as Wheatfield with Crows, and the tranquillity of Monet’s many depictions of water lilies. Van Gogh is believed to have committed suicide at age 37, dying of gunshot wounds; Monet was not so troubled and lived to a ripe old age of 86.
So what might we learn about God from the study of his creation? Bearing in mind the benign nature of the God who we are assuming is responsible for the features of the otherness of the mind we have discovered, let us see if there are traces of the same to be found in nature.
Design or many worlds
The first thing to note about the world is something very basic, namely that it is capable of sustaining life. In our earlier discussion of the anthropic principle we saw that the universe at first sight presents us with what seems to be a very hostile environment. Only a few isolated locations, such as planet Earth, are conducive to life. It is perhaps not the sort of world we ourselves would have created if our main aim was simply to provide a home for life. And yet closer examination led to the conclusion that if any number of its features had been slightly different from what they are, life for one reason or another would have proved impossible. It seems as though the world has been fine-tuned in order to accommodate us.
At the time, I warned against trying to use this observation as a proof that there must have been a Divine Designer. We know what happened to the attempt to use the ‘design’ of the human body as the basis for such an argument. And sure enough, just as Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined the earlier argument, so scientists have come up with a possible alternative explanation of the anthropic principle: the multiverse. This is the suggestion that there are many other universes – perhaps an infinite number – and they are all run on different lines, with just the occasional freak universe, such as our own, having by chance the characteristics required for the development of life.
While this is clearly a possibility, one needs to be clear that whereas there is a wealth of evidence to back up the theory of evolution, there is none at all to confirm the multiverse hypothesis. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the other universes, which by definition are not part of our own universe, could ever be accessed and their reality thus confirmed. Belief in them must rest on the seeming plausibility or otherwise of theories currently being devised setting out possible mechanisms for producing a plethora of universes. But theories not backed up by evidence do not count as science.
So what is it to be: a single uniquely designed universe on the one hand, or an infinite number of diverse universes on the other?
Those inclined to atheism have little choice but to put their faith in the multiverse. Religious believers have a choice. They might be inclined to prefer the former alternative as being the simpler solution, the latter seeming somewhat extravagant. But not necessarily so. We know that God’s adoption of the evolutionary process for producing us humans also gave rise to a rich abundance of other living creatures. Though God was presumably mainly interested in producing intelligent creatures that could enter into a relationship with him, he doubtless, like us, also takes delight in all the other animals and plants the creative process has brought forth. In the same way, God might well have adopted an analogous procedure for bringing our universe into existence alongside a great many other universes – variants that, while not of themselves containing life, might nevertheless be a source of delight to God.
Awe and beauty
A further feature of the inner life is the sense of the numinous. We have spoken about its awesome nature; it provokes in us what is sometimes called ‘godly fear’. This does not mean it is frightening in the ordinary sense of the word ‘fear’. Quite the contrary. The presence is benign and caring. Not only that, but our answers to prayer are generally understood to be reassuringly in our best interests. Nevertheless, the presence of the numinous does provoke a profound sense of respect and reverence – the kind of respect one might feel bound to show to a monarch. So do we find this awesomeness reflected in nature?
Without a doubt. On contemplating the universe, we immediately find ourselves confronted by the realization that God works on a different scale from us. Take, for example, the question of time. As is well known, the universe was created in a Big Bang. The stars so produced are gathered together in great swirling whirlpools called galaxies. Our own star, the Sun, is a member of the Milky Way galaxy. On observing the galaxies, one finds that they are still speeding away from each other in the aftermath of the Big Bang. By measuring their speeds and allowing for how these would have varied over time, we can calculate how long it must have taken for the galaxies to have reached their current positions. This yields an estimate of 13.8 billion years for the age of the universe.
Such a span of time defies the imagination. Given that God intended eventually to create consciousness in ourselves, and possibly in other creatures throughout the universe, we see that he works to a timescale very different from our own. This being so, perhaps this is telling us that we ourselves in our own lives could well adopt a different perspective as regards time, and practise more patience.
Then there is the question of size. Everything about the universe is big. The Sun is big enough to swallow up a million Earths. And yet, as already mentioned, it is but a star much like all the other stars. There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy, and there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Current estimates of the total number of stars in the universe stand at 70 billion trillion (7 x 1022). And that is just the observable universe. Because it takes time for light to reach us from distant objects, we can observe only those galaxies that are close enough for their light to have reached us in the 13.8 billion years that the universe has existed. This is called the observable universe. Beyond that, who knows how many galaxies there are in the universe as a whole. Nor do we necessarily stop there. As we have just been discussing, there could be universes other than our own.
Contemplating such figures creates in us a sense of awe. Reacting in such a manner to creation, we are led as a consequence to some appreciation of how awesome its Creator must be. Earlier we mentioned in connection with the mental experience of the presence of the numinous that such a presence contained some hint of awesomeness. Now, confronted by the immensity of the physical universe, we find that sense confirmed.
Closely associated with the experience of awe is the appreciation of beauty. We have seen that that too was a feature of our conscious experience, which was not always easy to explain in terms of being relevant to survival and reproduction. It is all too easy to take for granted that the world we live in contains many things that are considered beautiful – rainbows, flowers, trees, sunsets, snowy mornings, and so on – to say nothing of the beauty that mathematicians and scientists see in their equations and theories.
It need not have been so. The world could have been unremittingly ugly and brutal. Human existence could have been sheer misery. It takes little effort to dream up an odious God who might have created such a world simply because that reflected his own despicable nature. For someone who has come to know God in their own inner life, and who recognizes that the ability to appreciate beauty in nature is a gift from God, the sheer beauty of so much in the world speaks volumes as to the nature of its Creator.
The laws of nature
The world is not chaotic. At first sight it might seem so. Our early ancestors must have often found the world they lived in very unpredictable and quixotic. But over the course of time all that changed. We now recognize that everything that happens does so for a reason. Each event is a link in an orderly, predictable chain of cause and effect governed by the operation of a few elegant laws of nature.
Not that it has been easy to come to this realization. The discoveries of scientists have been hard won. Discerning the basic simplicity underlying the bewildering variety of nature requires intelligence. And that in turn raises an interesting question, namely: if it takes intelligence to work out that there are laws of nature, might it not have taken an Intelligence to create the laws in the first place? This would be a conclusion that fits in naturally with the suggestion that there is a God, those laws being a reflection of the orderliness and dependability of the mind of the Creator.
Order and disorder
According to Greek mythology, before the creation of the world there was chaos. Likewise, the book of Genesis speaks of a beginning that was formless; there was a watery deep over which the spirit of God moved. It seemed natural to ancient people that if something came into existence it would at first be shapeless; it would require some agency to develop it into something more distinctive. Indeed, we know that with the world the way it is there is a tendency for it to revert to chaos. One of the laws of nature we have been talking about is the second law of thermodynamics. This holds that entropy – that is to say, disorder – increases over time. A cup hitting the kitchen floor breaks; food decays; milk goes sour; the house requires continual cleaning; cars end up as wrecks; the Sun will eventually burn itself out; our bodies gradually wear out; death is unavoidable.
The reason for this is that there are far more disorderly states than orderly ones. Imagine you are shown two pictures. One depicts a tall factory chimney and the second is a pile of rubble. You are asked which came first: the intact chimney or the rubble? The answer is obvious. Rubble does not come together to create chimneys but chimneys can collapse and become rubble. There is only a very limited number of configurations of the bricks that make up a chimney but there is an unlimited number of configurations of those bricks that constitute a pile of rubble. So if one state is going to develop into another state, the latter has a much bigger chance of being an example of rubble rather than an example of a chimney. Hence the photograph of the ordered chimney is likely to have been taken first.
And yet all is not gloom and doom. The world is such that, against this overwhelming tide carrying everything towards chaos and disorder, there can be small pockets swimming in the opposite direction. Old chimneys are demolished but new ones are built to take their place; cups break but new ones are manufactured; stocks of food are replenished; cars in the showroom replace those in the scrapyard; old people die, but babies are born.
It is important to stress that none of this defies the second law’s inevitable march towards disorder. This becomes clear when one takes into account the bigger picture. By that I mean that all these activities ultimately depend, in one way or another, on the constant receipt of energy from outside. Ultimately we are talking about light and heat from the Sun. And the Sun, as it burns up its fuel in its great fires, is creating so much disorder that if we consider what is happening in the combined system of Sun-plus-Earth we would find that, overall, there would be a net increase in disorder in accordance with the law.
Not that there is any mystery over the fact that there can be these pockets of order working against a sea of disorder – a feature of the universe essential to our own existence. Scientists can undoubtedly account for it in terms of the ordinary working of nature. But it does strike me at least as extraordinary that the world is such as to allow such a thing to happen. If a human were set the task of designing an imaginary world and he or she came up with such a suggested scheme of things, it would be regarded as an act of genius.
The same goes for the workings of the human body and its powers of self-healing. We perhaps take it for granted that if we cut our finger all we have to do is put on a plaster to keep the dirt out, and it will in time heal. On breaking one’s leg, a surgeon might be required to set the bones and put the leg in plaster, but from then on it is the body itself that finishes the job of healing. This self-healing does not, of course, apply to everything that might go wrong with our bodies – cancer, for instance. But is it not remarkable that the body can to any extent at all swim against the tide leading to things going wrong? After all, what things made by humans – cars, washing machines, hair dryers – have any ability to put themselves right when they go wrong?
The ingenuity of the physical world shows itself in another way: at its most basic level matter is composed of simple electrons and quarks. The quarks together form neutrons and protons. Neutrons and protons form nuclei. Nuclei and electrons form atoms. Combinations of atoms give rise to molecules. It is at the molecular stage that something very peculiar emerges. If the shape of the basic building blocks of the universe had been simple round balls or cubes, and these came together to form larger structures, that is, ‘molecules’, these larger structures could take any random shape. The whole ensemble would, quite frankly, end up a mess. But things are not like that in this world. Its molecules are such that they have definite characteristic shapes. The water molecule, for instance, consisting of one atom of oxygen joined to two atoms of hydrogen, is such that the angle between the bonds linking the two hydrogens to the oxygen is always 104.5 degrees. It is never some other angle. And the same applies to other types of molecule; they each have their own characteristic structure. Moreover, these molecules can come together to produce even more elaborate structures, such as the helical form of the DNA molecule.
Again I hasten to say that scientists have a ready explanation of this in terms of the natural working out of the laws of nature. These shapes of atoms and molecules can be understood as arising out of the workings of quantum theory – the theory governing the behaviour of small entities such as atoms. Nevertheless, on reflection, one cannot but be impressed by this extraordinary self-organizing feature of the world. As with the existence of pockets of order we came across, might this not also hint at some underlying Intelligence at work?
Timelessness
One of the features commonly attributed to God is that he transcends time. God certainly works within time, as for example when we engage with him in prayer, but additionally, unlike ourselves, God is not confined by time. According to our human view of time, the past has ceased to exist; the future has yet to exist; all that exists is the present. But that is not how it is with God. Theologians hold that from his vantage point – whatever that might be – God has access to all of time. In particular he knows the future. It is not a question of God being capable of making a better-informed guess than ourselves as to what the future might hold. He knows the future.
This belief is founded on taking seriously various passages of the Bible. We have already come across one example of this when we recounted the story of Jeremiah being told by God that his future as a prophet had already been decided before he was born. In addition we have both St Peter and St Paul writing of God’s foreknowledge. Jesus spoke with complete conviction about his forthcoming crucifixion and resurrection. Likewise, the anticipated establishment of the kingdom of God is always spoken of as a fact, not merely as a pious hope. We have Jesus’ enigmatic statement: ‘Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8.58). Scholars point out that this is primarily a statement that Jesus outranks Abraham. Nevertheless, it does also seem to imply that there is some ambiguity regarding Jesus in relation to time.
God’s foreknowledge is a contentious issue. Some theologians – especially those known as process theologians – simply do not go along with it. They hold that until the future actually happens, knowledge of it is an impossibility. I suspect that might be your own gut feeling! Does an examination of the physical world throw any light on this subject? I believe so. To see how requires us to delve a little way into what Einstein’s theory of relativity has to say about the nature of the world.
In speaking of God as the Creator, we were at pains to point out that this did not mean God was the cause of the Big Bang. A cause of the Big Bang would have to have preceded it in time. But where the Big Bang was concerned, according to relativity theory, it marked the coming into existence of time, as well as of space. So there was no preceding time to accommodate a cause. This in turn implies that the creative influence responsible for the world’s existence, if we can call it that, must be coming from outside of time and space.
But how does relativity come to the conclusion that the connection between time and space is so intimate that with the expansion of space from nothing, implying that space came into existence at the Big Bang, so also did time?
Contrary to what one might instinctively think, we do not all inhabit the same space and time. If you are in an aeroplane flying overhead, your space is squashed up compared to mine (this is known as length contraction), and time in your moving aeroplane runs more slowly than mine (time dilation). At the speeds we are talking about, the differences are so tiny that we are unaware of them. There is, for example, no need to reset your watch on landing to get back into synchronization with those of us on the ground. But at high speeds – those approaching that of light, namely 300,000 kilometres per second, speeds reached by subatomic particles being whirled round particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Geneva where I used to work – the differences can be enormous.
So how are we to account for these differing spaces and times? The answer from relativity theory is that we are not dealing with a three-dimensional space and a separate one-dimensional time as is usually assumed. Instead, we inhabit a single four-dimensional reality called spacetime. Going back to the case of you being in an aircraft and myself on the ground, we disagree about both the separation in time and the separation in space of your departure from London and your subsequent arrival in New York. But we do agree about the separation of those two events in four-dimensional spacetime. This leads to the conclusion that what is real – what actually exists – is not space and time separately but this integrated spacetime. Space and time as we experience them are merely appearances of that reality from particular points of view. They are three-dimensional and one-dimensional projections respectively of the four-dimensional reality.
The fact that we disagree about the projections is no more significant than the manner in which a pencil can look long or short depending on our point of view relative to that object. In the case of the pencil, this difference over appearances does not bother us because we are aware that what we see with our eyes is no more than a two-dimensional projection of what in reality is a three-dimensional object. We are in agreement over what the length of the pencil is in three-dimensional space, and that is all that matters. It is this three-dimensional length that is the actual length of the pencil, not the two-dimensional appearances.
In the same way, we need to go beyond space and time viewed separately and concentrate on what the situation is in spacetime. Hermann Minkowski, a former tutor of Einstein, declared, ‘Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.’
And what do we expect to find in this spacetime? Whatever it is must be characterized by a particular position in space, coupled with a particular instant in time. It might, for example, be the departure of your aeroplane from London, Heathrow (its position), at 1.30 p.m. on Thursday (its point in time). In other words, we are dealing with events. The contents of spacetime are events.
An important feature of spacetime is this: not only do all points in space exist at each point in time, something we are perfectly happy to accept, but also each point in time exists at each point in space. So, for instance, where you are sitting now reading this book, not only does this present instant exist, but also the moment you took up the book to start reading, and the moment when (doubtless thankfully!) you set it aside to do something else. All events – past, present and future – exist on an equal footing. A very counter-intuitive idea, I am sure you will agree, but a conclusion that appears to follow on inevitably from acceptance of the reality of spacetime.
Next we note that nothing ever changes in spacetime. Changes can only occur in time. But spacetime is not in time; time is contained within spacetime. Due to its unchanging nature, certain scientists refer to spacetime as the block universe.
Nothing can be more alien to our instinctive feelings than the block universe. Our conscious perception of reality is inescapably one of change. So how does that fit with the unchanging nature of the block universe? What seems to be happening is that our consciousness acts like a sort of searchlight beam progressively scanning along the time axis of spacetime, making us consciously aware of what occurs at just one particular point in time. We give a label to this point in time: ‘now’. The searchlight beam then moves on to the adjacent point in time. The name ‘now’ is transferred to this new point. And so on, always moving in the direction towards that to which we give the name ‘future’. Thus we consciously experience sequentially only the events associated with a single point in time. It takes a great leap of the imagination to recognize that this changing experience is a feature solely of our conscious perception of reality and not a property of the physical reality itself. I suppose it is somewhat analogous to the way we consciously experience free will, whereas the physical description of reality seems to exclude it.
The block universe seems so counter-intuitive that, just as some theologians refuse to accept God’s foreknowledge, so also some physicists do not accept the block universe. As a physicist myself I do accept it – albeit somewhat reluctantly. I don’t see the alternative. Maintaining that only those events happening at the present instant can exist has become untenable. This is because of a further consequence of relativity theory. This shows that if the two of us are moving relative to each other – you in the aircraft passing me overhead – while there is no problem over our agreeing about what is happening at this instant where we are both located, say in London, we do not agree as to what is happening at the present instant in, say, New York. Which in turn means we cannot agree about what exists at the present instant in New York. None of which is a problem for the block universe idea; all events exist in New York. According to the block universe idea, the disagreement is merely one of deciding which of the existent events in New York should carry the time label ‘now’.
The outcome from this rather lengthy diversion into relativity theory is that if one accepts the block universe theory then it immediately becomes much easier to accept that God can indeed have foreknowledge. The objection to it was that it was impossible to know the future for certain until it happens – until it exists. But now we have good reason to believe that, in some sense (and don’t ask me to elaborate in what sense!), the future does indeed exist. All God has to do is to gain access to it from his vantage point transcending space and time. I often think that as a physicist – one who fully accepts the findings of relativity theory – it is easier for me to believe in God’s foreknowledge than it is for many a theologian. I count it as a classic case of gaining further insight into God’s manner of thinking from a study of the physical world he has created.
Miracles
We have been attempting to learn something of God through a consideration of the laws of nature. But how about violations of those laws; that is, miracles? When previously we studied miracle accounts we did so from the point of view of the sceptic. We found there was nothing there that compelled a sceptic of a need to accept them at face value. This, for example, might have been on the grounds that there could have been some natural explanation for what happened. In the case of recovery from an incurable illness or disability, there could have been an initial wrong diagnosis. We needed to take into account that people living long ago took a positive delight in wondrous tales of mysterious happenings. Accordingly, in trying to get across spiritual truths they had no qualms about playing fast and loose with what might be scientifically plausible.
But now the situation is different. We are now assuming that one has become convinced, through the experiences of one’s inner life, that there is a God, and that this God was the Creator of those laws of nature. From this perspective, it becomes reasonable to accept that the Creator of the laws had, and continues to have, the power to suspend those laws should he decide that circumstances called for it. It becomes no longer a question of whether miracles are possible; that is, whether God has the power to suspend the laws. The question is whether God does have sufficient reason, on occasion, to suspend them.
But if so, would not such interventions of necessity seem arbitrary and inconsistent? Not necessarily. Consider how the God encountered in one’s inner life is a loving God – a God who takes a personal interest in one’s well-being. We know what we would do if faced with a loved one in distress; we would do all in our power to help. Would that not be the same with this God of love? Would God not do all in his power to help those in need? Having the power to suspend the laws, would he not on occasion be obliged to exercise that right? Though at the physical level miracles are to be seen as violations of those laws, from a wider perspective such actions can be seen as perfectly in accord with an overriding higher law: the law of love.
If, as we shall later be discussing, Jesus was the Son of God, the perfect embodiment of love, then when faced with someone in need, he had no option but to help – using what supernatural powers he possessed if necessary. It should perhaps not surprise us that miracles were more prevalent at the time of Jesus’ ministry than they are today. Not that this is an excuse to accept all the miracle accounts listed in the Bible, lock, stock and barrel. The previous criticisms of some of the accounts still hold. But the idea that there might be a higher law of love, and that Jesus was someone especially bound to exercise that law, makes it no longer surprising that certain of the biblical accounts might in fact relate to events that did happen literally as described.
Especially this is so of those miracle accounts illustrating some spiritual truth. At the feeding of the 5,000, for instance, Jesus speaks of his ability to satisfy a more important spiritual hunger. When curing a man born blind, he draws attention to the spiritual blindness of certain of the onlookers. He uses the miraculous haul of fish to illustrate how he had in mind for the fisherman the higher task of becoming fishers of people.
In summary, what I am saying is that, while there is no excuse for being gullible when it comes to the acceptance of biblical miracles, once one has come to know God in the manner we have been discussing, then it encourages one to be more open-minded on the subject. I suppose my own ingrained habitual type of thinking as a professional scientist inclines me to be particularly cautious over the acceptance of miracles. Nevertheless, I am comfortable with the view that for at least some of the miracles there were good spiritual grounds for accepting them.
And in this regard one should not just be thinking of miracle accounts dating back to biblical times. Though miracles might have been more frequent at the time of Jesus’ ministry, for the reasons given, claims are still made today, particularly in regard to healing miracles. Some, as previously mentioned, might indeed arise through a misdiagnosis of the condition. But others are harder to dismiss. And why should they be dismissed out of hand? God’s loving actions were presumably not confined to the three years of Jesus’ ministry.
Communication through the physical
All the above relates to miracles in the narrow sense of their being violations of the physical laws. But strictly speaking, as we have already pointed out, in theological circles the word ‘miracle’ applies to any action that is particularly revelatory of God – whether or not it involves a violation of the laws. So far we have been looking at the world to see whether its various characteristic features offer clues as to the nature of its Creator. But does God additionally have something to reveal to us through certain particular events occurring in that world?
In Old Testament times this was very much thought to be the case. If, for example, there was some catastrophe such as a flood or a drought or a defeat in battle, this was regarded as God admonishing his people for their waywardness. If times were favourable with, for instance, abundant harvests, these were regarded as signs sent from God that he was pleased with them. In our own day we might hear of a miraculous escape from a car crash. This need not imply that we think that a law of nature has been suspended – a miracle in the narrow sense. But for someone who knows God, such a fortunate occurrence can well be regarded as God demonstrating his loving protection through the incident. Or perhaps by chance one happens to meet up with someone who later has some profound and beneficial effect on one’s life. We might simply put it down to luck that we met in the first place. Alternatively, we might conclude that it was God who destined us to meet.
But if God is communicating to us in this manner, how is this possible? How can his mind communicate with our minds in this way if, as we have been describing, the workings of this world are already laid down in a deterministic fashion – one slavishly following the dictates of the laws of nature?
This raises the general question as to how one mind affects another. In our normal encounters with people, the meeting of minds is exclusively mediated through the interaction of physical bodies in the physical domain. Adhering to the view that there is nothing odd going on in the human brain (that is, it behaves like everything else in accordance with the laws of nature), we nevertheless have no difficulty in accepting that one mind can make itself known to another.
Normally, of course, we are barely conscious that this meeting of minds is being conducted through a physical medium. We do not think of it in those terms. It becomes second nature to think in terms of a direct line of communication between one’s own mind and that of the other person. We habitually think of someone else’s thoughts and feelings directly influencing one’s own thoughts and feelings. It is only when we stop and think out the matter in detail that we come to accept that all mental transactions are, in the final analysis, physically mediated.
This being how we communicate one with another, why should God not do the same? If – discounting the possibility of telepathy – we have no need of a non-physical channel in order to communicate with someone else, why should God?
But, it might be countered, we communicate using our body. God does not have a body as such. True, but interactions between two human minds do not have to involve their bodies – at least not directly. When we look at a painting, listen to music, enter a building, see an advertisement on the television, walk down a street or read a book such as this one, we are all the time being influenced by the minds of others – those of the painter, the composer, the architect, the advertiser, the town planner and the author. All this without our having met them in the flesh. It is sufficient that we come into contact with their handiwork. If it is thus possible to influence one another through nothing more than the simple rearrangement of physical objects – applying paint to a canvas, ink to paper, and so on – how much easier it must be for God, the Designer and Creator of all physical things, to communicate with us through the physical world. God does not need a distinctive body. The whole of the created world is mapped on to him. He stands behind all things and uses all things to disclose himself to us.
That being the case, what does God actually do? If the laws of physics carry on regardless, is not God superfluous? In a sense, yes – the same sense as other minds are superfluous. After all, what do other minds do? As far as the behaviour of the human body is concerned – the body thought of purely as an object of physical interest – the answer is, nothing. The laws of physics take care of everything. But in another manner of speaking, one that recognizes the existence of minds, and where we ask different kinds of question, the answer is that minds do everything. It is the same with God. As far as the study of physics is concerned, he too is superfluous. But when it comes to other kinds of discussion – those founded on a prior knowledge of the mind of God based on experience of one’s own inner life – then God is seen to be permeating the whole of existence and all that goes on in it.
Up to now we have been looking at the world to see whether we can see indications that God has left his imprint on it – indications that back up the conclusions we have drawn about God’s nature as found in consciousness. But if we are to be honest, we have to face up to what, at least at first sight, appear to be counter-indications – features that are hard to reconcile with the picture we have so far formed of God. This is to be the subject of this and the next section.
We begin by examining the process of evolution by natural selection. Is it consonant with the idea that this was a loving God’s chosen method of producing us humans and the other animals?
Being a scientist myself I have no alternative but to accept the theory; the evidence in its favour is overwhelming. Many Christians do not go along with it, preferring instead the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, taken as a literal description of what actually happened. Partly this is through a sense of reverence for Scripture; partly it is because they find it difficult to believe that something as complicated as the bodies of humans and the other animals could have arisen in such a fashion.
There is a third reason for their discounting evolution. This is the difficulty of reconciling God’s loving nature with the sheer cruelty and suffering that is incorporated into the evolutionary process. The theory requires many individuals to die premature and often painful deaths. Only those lucky enough to possess favourable gene mutations should mate and pass on those advantageous genes to the next generation. Those possessing less advantageous genes have to be eliminated, and this before they reach an age where they can pass their inferior genes to the next generation. Even those lucky enough to have mated have eventually to die in order to make way for the next generation. Only so can a species develop further and become more sophisticated, culminating in ourselves. There is no doubt about it: evolution is harsh and unfair.
So why would a good, loving God of justice choose such a method for bringing into the world creatures that could enter into a loving relationship with him? To address this question we need to examine what the alternatives might have been.
Could he, for example, metaphorically have sat down at a drawing board, designed us and then assembled us atom by atom according to the blueprint? Possibly, but what would have been the result? A robot. Could the robot say, ‘God, I love you’? Yes. But only if that was what God programmed it to say. Would that have been genuine love? Of course not. In order to be able to offer genuine love one has to have a certain measure of independence from the person being loved. Love has to be freely offered. There has to be the possibility that it will be withheld. But a robot has no such freedom. It is nothing more than what its creator has dictated that it should be.
Suppose there had been more than one creator god. We could then envisage a human created by one of these gods showing a preference for one of the other gods – one who had had nothing to do with its formation. Such a human might transfer their love and loyalty to the second god. A love like that does have a chance of being genuine as it has been offered from a position of independence. But of course that is not how things are. There is no multiplicity of creator gods. The one God has created everything; nothing exists independently of God. So this is no solution to the problem as to how we are to acquire the necessary degree of independence.
So what is God’s solution? The answer is chance. Instead of meticulously and slavishly designing each and every feature of us, God instituted a procedure capable of producing us on his behalf, so to speak – a procedure that would incorporate an element of chance. It is the unpredictable random mutations to the genes that confer on us our own individual, distinctive characteristics.
But, one might argue, if the whole procedure is based on chance, how could God possibly know what the end product would turn out to be? On the face of it, without a proper plan, it would appear to be a recipe for producing a mess! Not so. This is where natural selection comes into its own. Yes, the variations to the genes are random, and indeed most of them are probably deleterious. But natural selection weeds out the poor ones, leaving only the advantageous ones.
In recent years evolutionary biologists have come to the realization of just how predictable the outcome of evolution can be. Start the evolutionary process over again, on some other planet perhaps, and creatures will emerge that in many respects resemble ourselves. For example, there is so much survival value in being able to see that creatures with eyes are almost bound to emerge. Indeed, in the course of evolutionary history here on Earth, different kinds of eyes have evolved independently of each other. There is, for instance, a world of difference between the compound eye of a fly and the camera-type eye of humans. But the same goal is achieved: they can see. The same goes for hearing, for the ability to run or to fly, for being intelligent, and so on. As the palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris has pointed out, all these and many other qualities were almost certain to emerge over the course of time. This feature of the evolutionary process is known as convergence.
Thus despite the element of randomness, God could rely on the process producing creatures that were intelligent enough to reflect on the meaning of life – whether or not it went further than just the daily round of keeping alive. Creatures would emerge that could relate to God. Moreover, by virtue of the measure of independence they had gained, they could love God with a genuine love should they so choose.
In summary, I think this is why God adopted evolution by natural selection as his method of making us. Yes, it involves suffering and death – topics we shall come on to – but I don’t see how a God whose overwhelming priority is the fostering of genuine love had any viable alternative.
And so we face the general, age-old problem of evil and suffering. The evil of people cheating, lying, stealing, committing murder, sexually assaulting and bullying children, mugging, carrying out terrorist attacks, waging war. There is suffering – that inflicted by these deliberate evil actions, together with further instances of suffering arising from natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, drought, disease.
Let us be clear from the start. There is no easy pat answer as to why a supposedly all-powerful, loving God would permit these things to happen. On the face of it, the existence of evil and suffering seems a clear indication that there is no such God. But as we shall discover, closer examination reveals that matters are more complicated than that – much, much more complicated and multifaceted.
We begin by asking whether evil is real. I know that sounds a silly question but, as a preliminary, one does have to take it seriously. Is it really true that there are two forces at work: good and evil? According to one point of view the answer is ‘No’. Only goodness exists; evil is merely the absence of goodness. This is in much the same way as ‘darkness’ is not a real entity; it is simply the absence of light. Only light is real. ‘Cold’ is another of these negative qualities. It is an absence of heat. Heat is real; it is the energy of molecules jiggling about or the energy of the rays emitted by the Sun or a fire. Cold is nothing but an absence of these features. If this is how we ought to regard evil then it is not something God has created. All God has done is to create goodness.
It is a pretty neat way of getting out of the problem. It is certainly true that negative qualities can have all the appearance of being a force in their own right. We freely talk of putting on extra clothing to keep the cold out, rather than to keep the heat in. In the evening we might speak of the darkness closing in, rather than the light fading. Nevertheless, treating evil as merely an absence of goodness surely does not do justice to the sheer scale of certain evil acts – the Holocaust or the atrocities committed by Islamic terrorists, for example. No, evil is something we do have to regard as being just as real as goodness and something that therefore needs to be accounted for.
Some blame the devil. The devil is pictured as a fallen angel. He was created by God but rebelled against his Maker. It is the devil who brought evil into the world. Today we are inclined to dismiss the idea of there being a devil. The word conjures up a picture of horns, a tail and a red cloak. We treat him as a joke. In times past it was helpful for people to think of evil as personified, actively luring people into sin. It helped them to take temptation to do wrong seriously and hence resist it. But I suppose few today regard the idea of the devil as being something we have to take literally. In any case, if there is a devil whose prime purpose is the spread of evil, it was God who created the devil and so presumably carries some of the responsibility.
Are we being forced to the conclusion that God is not entirely good, as we have been assuming? The psychologist Carl Jung was of that view. According to him, there is indeed a dark side to God. Among the Jungian archetypes we possess there is one called the shadow. It embodies those aspects of the self that the ego rejects as evil, damaging or reprehensible. Jung claimed that the shadow was also a feature of God’s personality. He wrote:
The God I experienced is more than love; he is also hate, he is more than beauty, he is also the abomination. . . If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful. Good and evil.
But let us not be hasty. Before accepting Jung’s somewhat morally ambiguous type of God, there are further considerations to be examined.
Having discounted the idea of evil being nothing more than the absence of goodness, we nevertheless have to recognize that there is a close connection between the two. In order to understand evil as the absence of goodness, we had first to know what we meant by goodness. That remains true. Without goodness, we would not know what evil is. And the reverse is true: without evil, we would not know what goodness is.
It is an odd thing about words that to a large extent they gain their meaning by reference to their opposites. Suppose, for instance, we had been brought up all our lives imprisoned in a windowless building in which the only illumination was by sodium lamps similar to the familiar yellow sodium street lights. Everything we saw was a shade of yellow. Would we know what the word ‘yellow’ meant? No. In practice we understand what we mean by ‘yellow’ because we live in a world where objects are lit by white light, making some objects appear yellow, but others not. Under these circumstances we are able to say, ‘These objects are yellow; those are not.’
As a further example, suppose you are trying to learn a foreign language and someone points to a chair and says a certain word for it. She then points to other chairs and again says the same word. Can you immediately conclude that this is the word for ‘chair’? No. For all you know, it might mean ‘furniture’. It is only when she points to the table, the sideboard, a stool and shakes her head that you can eliminate the possibility that this foreign word means ‘furniture’.
Thus we find it is only by being aware of examples of things that are not described by the word, as well as things that are, that we come to understand the meaning of the word.
In the same way, we come to understand the meaning of ‘goodness’ only in contrast to the word ‘evil’. A world without evil would be a world where the concept of goodness would have no meaning. Evil is the price we have to pay for goodness. It appears to be a logical necessity. Even a so-called all-powerful God must of necessity abide by this restriction.
The next point to note is that the distinction between what is good and what is evil is not always straightforward. Take the nuclear bomb. With its capacity for eliminating all life on Earth, it is widely regarded as the world’s worst evil. But possession of a nuclear capacity acts as a deterrent to aggressors, and has probably averted World War Three. Certainly the loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrendous, but it did bring that war to a conclusion, with the consequent saving of many other lives.
Likewise, science has much to answer for: global warming, pollution, damage to the ozone layer, questions to do with cloning, genetically modified crops and the development of ever more sophisticated and destructive weapons of war. But to offset those we have the undoubted benefits that have come with science, especially medical science. It is as well to recall that only a few hundred years ago one had less than a 50–50 chance of surviving to one’s teens. I might add that I myself am particularly grateful for the invention of the high-speed dentist’s drill and its replacement of the old, juddering, nerve-shredding predecessor!
This blurring of the distinction between good and bad shows up in all walks of life. A company falls on hard times and the management decide the firm needs to downsize. Employees are made redundant. There are protests that the management is being hard-hearted, causing the harsh times that will now befall the unlucky ones and their families. But what was the alternative? The company being allowed to fold with the loss of all jobs?
Or take the dilemmas that often face a mother. Naturally she does not want to hurt or deny her child. But sometimes she is forced to. She knows that removing the sticky plaster from the cut finger will cause momentary pain, but someone has to do it. Yes, the child loves sugary drinks, but it is in the child’s longer-term interests if she temporarily incurs the child’s wrath at having to forgo such indulgences.
Pain is widely regarded as a useful warning against dangers. The pain of appendicitis, for example, is the signal to get oneself to hospital. A horrible taste can be an indication that one should have looked at the sell-by date on the can. Of course, not all such unpleasant experiences are helpful. What use is it to suffer from arthritic pain, or the pain associated with many other conditions and diseases of various sorts, when there is nothing one can do about them? Nevertheless, certain kinds of pain can be useful.
Then there is the pain and risk we willingly take on in pursuit of some higher objective. Athletes and other sportsmen and -women, for instance, generally do not like having to train. Yet they voluntarily put themselves through all kinds of painful and boring exertions. This they do in the knowledge that it is only by such disciplined actions that there can be any prospect of success. Skiers are prepared to risk breaking a leg in order to experience the thrill of their sport. Californians enjoy their sunny lifestyle despite the knowledge that they live on the San Andreas fault line with the ever-present threat that one day there will be another earthquake such as that which destroyed San Francisco in 1906.
In so many ways good ends are achievable only by painful means. If we decide to take on such risks, we ourselves must surely shoulder some of the blame if things go wrong. We can hardly blame God.
But let us return to the problem posed by those situations where there is a clear distinction between evil and goodness, and where suffering is unavoidable. Where does gratuitous evil come from if we are not to hold an all-loving God responsible for it? It is time to turn to what has come to be known as the free-will argument.
We begin by noting that if we were gods, in charge of making a universe, I am sure we would want the creatures living in that world to be happy. It seems only natural that we would want them to enjoy life and live it to the full rather than be miserable. It is not for nothing we find, enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness held to be one of the unalienable rights of citizens. So if that is the kind of world we would have created, we might unthinkingly expect God to have done the same.
But God did no such thing. He made no promises of happiness. His priorities lay elsewhere. For God, what mattered was not superficial happiness but love. Love was his sole concern. And that being the case, certain unavoidable consequences follow.
First, we must be given free will. This is something we have already touched on in our discussion as to why God chose evolution by natural selection as his method for creating us. We had to have a measure of independence from him in order that we could of our own free will offer him our love and loyalty.
What we did not mention at that time, however, is that for that freedom to be real there had to be instances where that freedom was misused to reject God. If the situation was such that theoretically everyone could reject him, but in practice it was unthinkable that anyone ever would, that would surely call into question how meaningful this so-called freedom actually was. It is the real possibility that love might be withheld that makes the offering of love so valued. We see this in human relations. A boy tells a girl that he loves her. She is delighted. But then she finds out that he says that to every girl he meets. It is now not the same. His declaration of love is devalued. For her to feel special he has to be seen to be rejecting others in her favour.
And so it is with our love for God. It is the fact that so many turn their backs on God that makes the loyalty of the faithful so valuable. And turning one’s back on God – which is something we all do from time to time – is turning aside from the source of all goodness, and that is how we come to embrace the opposite, which is evil. So where does evil originate? It does not come from God; it comes from us. Evil exists not because God wishes it, but because in order to achieve his objective, which is purely to create love, he has no alternative but to allow us to create evil. I repeat: without evil there is no good; without rejection there is no love. Even an all-powerful God has to abide by these logical necessities.
Another point to note: in order for us to be able to exercise free will we must be able to anticipate what will be the likely outcome of any action we choose to take. The world we live in has to be law-like and predictable – as indeed it is. Not only that, the world is the common medium by which we individuals, through the use of our physical bodies, interact with each other. It is a world where it cannot bend its rules to fit the whim of some individual because that might infringe the interests of some other person – one who has just as much, or as little, right to have things their way. You might want sunshine because you are going on holiday; a farmer might want rain for his crops. The arena in which we jointly operate must be neutral; it must have a nature of its own.
But it surely follows that, with this being the case, we might from time to time fall foul of nature operating in this blind automatic fashion – hence natural disasters. Allowing such things to happen is another price that has to be paid once love is raised to be the highest priority.
Another requirement for there to be love is that there should be opportunities for demonstrating it. Obviously. But how is love demonstrated? By having good times together? Going to parties? Sitting in the cinema eating popcorn together? Lots of sex? Motherly cuddling of a baby? Such activities might indeed be features of a loving relationship. But they do not constitute proof of love. They are enjoyable activities in themselves; we might be engaging in them purely for our own self-gratification. Proof – actual proof – of love, on the other hand, is demonstrated through the way we are prepared to put ourselves out in attending to the needs of the other: how we behave in times of trouble; how we sacrifice our own interests to alleviate the suffering of the other.
We see this, for example, in the way a mother, desperately tired after a hard day, will nevertheless get up in the middle of the night to change the baby’s nappy. A husband devotes himself to the care of his disabled wife who has suffered a stroke, rather than going off with another woman. Someone, deeply moved by the plight of those suffering from a natural disaster, makes a big donation they can hardly afford.
It is the extent to which we are prepared to set aside our own interests in order to meet the needs and alleviate the suffering of others that is the true measure of love. Of course suffering is to be avoided if at all possible, but when it happens it can be marshalled for good. It provides an opportunity for love to flourish. It brings people together. It deepens relationships.
Indeed, it is probably true to say that a world in which love is the highest priority is one where there has to be suffering also. After all, for Christians, how do we know that God loves us? Primarily by the sending of his Son to live with us and to endure great suffering on our behalf. Had Jesus lived a comfortable, privileged life, to a grand old age, living in a mansion in Surrey, playing golf on a Sunday, would we know for sure how he felt about us? Would our attitude towards him have been different? Of course it would.
There is one further thought regarding God as a God whose prime quality is that of love. We have earlier pointed out that theologians have long held that God as he is in himself is absolutely unknowable. When trying to describe God we have to fall back on metaphors and analogies. When, for example, we speak of God as our Heavenly Father we are saying that our relationship to God is something like our relationship with our earthly father. We do this fully accepting that there are, nevertheless, aspects where the similarity breaks down. God obviously does not have to earn a living; he does not support a particular football team. The same sort of thing applies when we speak of God as the Creator. We are saying that God as the source of all existence is a little like us creating a painting, composing music, a home environment, and so on – but not quite. God creates from nothing; we create by rearranging what already exists. Again, when Christians speak of Christ as the Son of God, or as our Heavenly King, we are saying that these can be helpful ways for conveying a measure of understanding of these relationships, without implying that the father–son and sovereign–subject analogies hold in every respect.
All this is well known. What is not so readily recognized when speaking of the nature of God, is that when we describe him as the God of love, we are again using an analogy. We are saying God’s relationship to us is something like the love we might show to another person. But the similarity is unlikely to be exact. Thus we cannot legitimately argue that, just because our type of love might inhibit us from putting someone else through some kind of trial does not necessarily mean God’s type of love would similarly prohibit it.
With our type of love for fellow humans, as we have seen, it begins with the wish to promote the other person’s happiness. But if this leads to a mother always giving in to the short-term wishes of her child, regardless of the possible longer-term consequences, then this is no longer love but indulgence. True love cannot be solely centred on the promotion of happiness here and now. The priority has to be what is ultimately best for the other. For this reason, the good mother insists on unwelcome discipline over such matters as cleaning teeth, cutting down on the intake of sugar, doing homework – all this in the face of uncomprehending protests from the child. So if this is how love in action is modified as a result of seeing life in a longer-term context, might we not expect that from God’s even wider transcendental perspective an even higher form of love might lead to yet further unexpected, and from our limited point of view seemingly incomprehensible, outcomes? Let me repeat: in claiming that God is a God of love, we are simply drawing an analogy between Divine love and our ordinary human type of love. The analogy is not exact. Certainly it does not follow that the existence of evil and suffering rules out a God of love. It depends on how one defines ‘love’.
Another attribute of God is that he is held to be a God of justice. But is life just? One has only to consider the various life experiences of people to realize that it manifestly is not. Compare, for example, the comfortable lifestyle of an American or European middle-class person with that of a refugee fleeing a war-torn, famine-ravaged African nation. Where does a God of justice fit in with this picture? That is the subject of the next section.
The unfairness of life depends on one big assumption, namely that this earthly life is all that there is. But that is not the case according to the world’s major religions. This life is but part of the overall picture. There is a kind of existence that extends beyond the one we presently experience. There are disagreements between the religions as to what exactly that other life consists of: heaven and hell, nirvana, reincarnation, and so on. But there is one thing they do agree about, and that is that the quality of that other life is dependent on the kind of life we live in the here and now. It is only in this way that the manifold injustices of this life have a chance of being put right. Belief in an eternal life becomes indispensable to belief in a God of justice and, indeed, to belief in a God of love.
Of course there will be those who dismiss the idea of life beyond death as nothing more than a vain hope for ‘pie in the sky when you die’. Sigmund Freud put it down to wish fulfilment. But one of the problems with dismissing it as wish fulfilment is that none of the great Old Testament figures fell prey to it. Here we have in mind Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Presumably they would have wished for it as much as we. But for most of Old Testament times there was no belief in resurrection, just a vague belief in a kind of existence called Sheol, probably meaning ‘non-land’ or ‘un-land’. It was held to be a closed space under the disc of the Earth. It was a place of darkness and silence where one was condemned to a ghost-like existence. A mere shadow of one’s former self, one was incapable of interacting with other people or with God. Hardly something to be wished for! According to those earlier beliefs, one lived on only in one’s surviving kin, hence the importance of having children to carry on the line. Acceptance that there was a personal life beyond, and moreover that it might be something to be desired, was a late development. In the Bible one finds it for the first time in the book of Daniel, dated around 165 bce, and it culminates in the teachings of Jesus and the claim that he himself underwent resurrection.
So we can set aside the assertion (for that is all it is) that belief in life beyond the grave is mere wish fulfilment. Even so, is such a belief tenable? When gazing at a dead body, or at a skeleton, or the ashes resulting from a cremation, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this marks the end of that person. We are all too aware that the conscious self is intimately bound up with what goes on in the physical body, and especially in the brain. It would, therefore, appear but logical to accept that when the body is destroyed, and there is no longer a brain, consciousness must die with it.
But are we in fact being logical? Such a conclusion rests on an important assumption – one that goes largely unacknowledged. We are assuming that over the course of evolution, as the human brain became ever more complicated and sophisticated in its structure and workings, this complexity led to the brain becoming conscious. Consciousness is regarded as being a natural outgrowth of the physical complexity. In other words, consciousness is a by-product of biology. It is the biology that causes consciousness. Take away the biological basis and consciousness has no independent existence.
However, such an interpretation does have its difficulties. First, we need to recognize that no one – and I mean absolutely no one – has the slightest understanding as to how consciousness is supposed to emerge out of something that is physical. As was pointed out earlier, there have been attempts, but none has succeeded in supplying a mechanism by which one gives rise to the other. Claiming that biology gives rise to consciousness when there is a complete absence of any explanation as to how this comes about becomes a matter of faith rather science.
We have here a classic problem often encountered in the medical and social sciences: confusion over correlation and causation. In the present discussion there is no doubt that for the type of consciousness we know about there is a correlation between it and a physical human body. Sure enough, if you take a paracetamol it is accompanied by the mental sensation of relief from pain. Likewise, damage to the brain due to a stroke can be accompanied by a loss of cognitive ability. But is that correlation correctly to be regarded as a causal one?
I recall, for example, the result of a survey that clearly demonstrated a correlation between coffee drinking and heart disease. The more coffee you drank, the greater your chance of having heart problems. The blame lay with the caffeine contained in coffee. On reading this news report I and many others promptly took the advice doctors were giving at the time and switched to decaffeinated coffee – even though I did not really like it. This went on for years. But then further investigations, carried out with greater care, revealed that the uptight, stressed kind of person who habitually drinks lots of coffee was also likely to be a heavy smoker. This had been overlooked. Later surveys that carefully controlled for the smoking habit demonstrated that it was not the caffeine that was responsible for the increased heart disease but the accompanying habit of smoking. In fact one could drink six cups of coffee a day with no ill effects should one so wish. Certainly the disease was correlated to the caffeine, but the connection was incidental; it was not causal. Needless to say, I am back to drinking proper coffee again!
This kind of confusion is common. In the case of the brain and consciousness, there is an absence of any known mechanism by which the physical brain can be understood to give rise to consciousness. Indeed, how can something physical be responsible for the production of something that is so different in nature from itself that it requires an entirely different language to describe it?
In the philosophy of science, data is often referred to as being ‘theory-laden’. This idea holds that as one approaches one’s observations of the world, one’s mind is not a blank waiting to absorb objective facts. Instead one already entertains some theory or has a particular mindset, and this affects how one interprets the observations.
The neuroscientist’s prime concern is with the workings of the brain. It is not surprising, then, on finding a certain pattern of brain activity to be accompanied by a certain mental process, that she interprets the situation as the brain process having caused the mental process. Without the brain activity, there would not have been the changed mental state.
However, on leaving the laboratory and making her way home she now adopts a different mindset. The question arises as to whether she will go home by bus or train; should she stop on the way to buy something for dinner; what in fact will she decide to have for dinner that night; which television programmes will she choose to watch; should she have an early night . . .? One decision after another. The physical/mental situation has been reversed. She is no longer concerned with the mechanics of how the brain works, but is getting on with the business of living her day-to-day life. It is now a case of mental decisions being made and these leading to the appropriate physical actions. Thus, contrary to what we were earlier saying, it is the mental state that has caused the physical action.
Thus the whole question of causation is intimately bound up with the mindset one has adopted. For the neuroscientist in the laboratory, what matters are brain processes – conscious experience being a mere epiphenomenon. On the other hand, for most of us, most of the time, what matters is living out one’s day-to-day life – the physical world being merely a medium through which the mind achieves its aims and objectives through controlling the actions of the body.
And not just controlling the body in general, but the brain in particular. Just now we said that changes to the brain state brought about by taking paracetamol causes the mental headache to be cured. But equally we could have said that it was the mental decision to take the paracetamol that led to the changed brain state.
It has been shown that brain training with simple games conducted online can cut the risk of dementia by a third. Brain scans show that if one engages in repeated mental exercises, such as the practice of meditation, this leads to the building of new neuronal circuits. The more the activity is repeated, the stronger these new circuits become. As we have said, in these instances the natural interpretation of what is going on is that it is the focused mental attention that is the cause of the changed brain states, and not the other way round.
To sum up, all we can be sure about is that there is a correlation between what goes on in the brain and what goes on in the mind. The question of which causes which, or whether one can occur without the other, is much more contentious. Certainly there is no justification for asserting that the only way of interpreting the data is to claim that consciousness is caused by biology, and hence, without an ongoing biological basis, there cannot be consciousness, and thus there cannot be eternal life beyond the death of the physical brain.
An alternative way of looking at the problem is to say that if we are to bring causation into the discussion, then it is not biology that is the cause of consciousness but God – God being defined as the source of all existence. As we have noted, God is not only the source of the physical world but also of consciousness. Consciousness ultimately owes its existence to God, not to biology.
That being so, who is to say God cannot take consciousness, as shaped in conjunction with the physical body, and give it a further type of existence divorced from the physical? Admittedly it is difficult for us to envisage a consciousness divorced from a physical body, and in particular its brain. But the consciousness of God does not require it to be associated with a physical body. Our consciousness is derived from the conscious aspect of God – a chip off the old block, so to speak – so why should not God be able to transpose it to an altogether different, non-physical, realm of existence – heaven or whatever? The physical life we lead can then be regarded merely as a ‘vale of soul-making’, as the poet John Keats put it. Or, to express it another way, our physical life is merely a mould through which our spiritual selves are shaped and take form, a mould that can subsequently be broken at death because by then the soul can be endowed with an independent type of existence.
But what exactly is God going to resurrect? Christians speak of the resurrection of the body. This can lead to confusion. It does not mean that the decayed remnants of the dead body are to be reassembled to form an intact body once more. It is a statement meant to convey the idea that we shall preserve our individuality, rather than being absorbed into some kind of anonymous spiritual soup.
The common view, I suppose, is that God resurrects us as the kind of person we are at the time of death, one’s younger self having passed into oblivion. Which, if true, is surely a pity. How many die with Alzheimer’s disease or a host of other disabilities mental and physical? Is that what God is to perpetuate? What if God preferred us as we used to be earlier in life, before we might have become somewhat world-weary, disillusioned, cynical, and so on?
There is an alternative. The theologian Franz-Josef Nocke wrote: ‘Bodily resurrection means that a person’s life history and all the relationships established in the course of his history enter together in the consummation and finally belong to the risen person.’ Another theologian, Wilhelm Breuning, agrees: ‘Resurrection of the body means that in God man rediscovers not only his last moment but his history.’ Likewise, Hans Küng claims: ‘What matters is the identity of the person. The question arises then of the permanent importance of my whole life and lot.’
Some might find it difficult to accept that events which have long ago ceased could somehow be brought back into existence in this manner. Surely, it might be argued, when I die all that exists is how I am at that particular point in time. My present form has replaced the earlier versions of me. It is a logical impossibility to have all versions of me, and everything that has ever happened to me, all existing together.
But no, it is not a logical impossibility. Or at least it is not according to one widely held interpretation of physics. Recall our earlier discussion of Einstein’s ideas about space and time and how they are to be seen as but projections of a four-dimensional reality named spacetime. We saw that spacetime, otherwise known as the block universe, consists of all the events that have ever happened, are happening and are yet to happen according to our normal perception of events occurring sequentially in time. It all exists on an equal footing. In particular, all the events that make up our lives, from birth to death, are etched permanently into this four-dimensional existence. It is called our world line.
Earlier we discussed the block universe in the context of God being able to possess foreknowledge. From a position that is somehow ‘outside’ of spacetime – in a still higher dimension, so to speak – he can take it all in at once. Now we examine spacetime to see whether it can throw any light on eternal life and resurrection. According to relativity theory, the whole of our world line exists. Moreover, it exists eternally. We pointed out that spacetime cannot exist in time; rather, time is incorporated into spacetime. So acceptance of the notion of spacetime is indeed acceptance also that it makes sense to think of this block of space and time existing as an entity suspended in some higher form of dimensionality – one that is transcendent, eternal, beyond time. And if this is the case, what is true of spacetime as a whole must also be true in particular of our world line. There is nothing more truly you or me than our world line – it incorporates the totality of our life. And there it is, existing in this eternal arena.
That being the case, why resurrect us as we happen to be at the very end point of our world line when spacetime offers God access to the whole of our life, with our childhood as vividly present to him as any other feature of our history? So perhaps, in some sense entirely beyond our comprehension, resurrection applies to the whole of our world line, not just to its end point.
Earlier we spoke of the searchlight beam of consciousness sweeping sequentially along the world line from birth to death. Perhaps when that is switched off at the point of death, we become more acutely aware of an ever-present type of conscious experience associated with the totality of our world line. After all, it is commonly held by theologians that eternal life is not something that will happen to us later after death; we are already embarked upon it in this life. One of the conventional phrases a priest might say over someone receiving Holy Communion is ‘The body of Christ keep you in eternal life.’ Note the word ‘keep’. Perhaps through those qualities of consciousness that are hard to explain as belonging to the mind of a self-replicating survival machine we are already experiencing this transcendent type of consciousness – that of which we shall be more vividly aware when the distractions and demands of ordinary consciousness are stilled at death.
But enough of speculation – for that is all it is: the idiosyncratic musings of a physicist. Let us turn to a topic that is more grounded: what actual evidence might there be for life beyond death, particularly for the Christian idea of resurrection?
To begin with, we ask what we are to make of accounts given by people claiming to have come back from the dead. We are told how they had experiences of passing through a tunnel into a blinding light, or floating out of their body and looking down on it lying in the hospital bed, visions of their physical body being linked by a silver umbilical cord to a spiritual body, encounters with orbs, feelings of joy and peace, and so on. These are called near-death experiences, and that is what they are: near-death experiences. The whole subject of how one is to define death is a contentious one. Certainly it can be identified with the irreversible stoppage of all vital functions, but how is that to be determined? The heart stopping, breath stopping, brain inactivity, or what? There have been innumerable examples of people being resuscitated from such conditions, so they were not really dead. And the same applies to all those reporting near-death experiences: they might have been close to dying, but they did not actually die. Indeed, one does not even have to be close to death to have such experiences. They can be triggered, for example, by stress, depression, emotional crises or meditation.
As for deathbed visions, these are occasions when someone who is close to death, often a resident in a hospice, speaks of being visited by dead relatives or angels who have come to accompany them to the next life. It is not easy to account for such occurrences, but one thing is clear: they are not in themselves a first-hand experience of a life beyond.
Which brings us to the reported resurrection of Jesus. How reliable are we to regard the accounts of that?
First, we note that we can surely discount any claim that he did not really die. He was crucified; he had a sword thrust into his side; he was in the tomb for three days. So having died, we can take it that coming back to life again would have required a miracle – a miracle in what we have been calling the narrow sense, meaning it must have involved a violation of the normal laws of nature. Consequently, reminding ourselves of the various reservations we expressed earlier when dealing with law-breaking miracles in general, we are alerted to the need to be on our guard over accepting too easily the accounts of this resurrection as being literally what happened. We know only too well the cavalier approach ancient people had over embellishing stories of wondrous happenings.
However – and it is a big however – close examination of these resurrection accounts reveals that there is a world of difference between this miracle and the others.
In the first place we need to recognize that traditional Jewish miracle stories were invariably written to a pattern. Each was divided into three parts. The first part sets the scene. For a typical healing miracle it would describe the condition of the person to be cured in sufficient detail to indicate that it really would take a miracle to bring about a cure. So, for example, the man was born blind; it was not some temporary blindness. Then comes the main part of the story, the account of the miracle itself, complete with accompanying words and actions. Thus the blind man has mud put on his eyes and he is told to go and wash them. Finally, the last part describes the reaction of the onlookers; they are utterly astonished, demonstrating that this was indeed an amazing event.
How do the accounts of the resurrection conform to this pattern? The first part of the story is there – all the events leading up to the crucifixion: the Last Supper, Jesus’ betrayal, his trial and torture, his death, his burial and the guards put in place outside his tomb. The third part of the story is there: his subsequent appearances on various occasions to the women and to the disciples, the words he spoke to them, his invitation to doubting Thomas to put his hand into the wound caused by the sword and his fingers into the marks of the nails, the general expressions of astonishment and delight on the part of those who witnessed the risen Jesus. So we have in place two of the components of a traditional Jewish miracle story.
But where is the middle section – the all-important part that describes the actual miracle itself, complete with accompanying actions and words? It is not there. It is entirely missing. Why? Scholars tell us that it is unthinkable for a Jewish miracle story to be composed in such a form. One can judge just how scandalous this was deemed to be by examining the accounts in the order in which they were written. In doing so we find the writers progressively trying to fill in the missing details. Beginning with the earliest of the Gospels, Mark describes the empty tomb with the stone that was originally in front of the entrance rolled away. The women enter the tomb and find it empty apart from a young man in a white robe who tells them that Jesus has risen. And that’s it; there are no further details. (Here we are referring to the most reliable early manuscripts of the Gospel, which do not have the additional verses, Mark 16.9–20.) In Matthew’s later Gospel we are told that this man was an angel – an identification perhaps helped by the fact that in the first century angels were not thought to have wings. Instead of the tomb already being open, Matthew describes the angel descending and rolling away the stone that was blocking the entrance, to the accompaniment of an earthquake. By the time we get to Luke and John, the angel has been joined by a second one, their clothes ‘gleaming like lightning’.
Thus we see the first attempts to cover the embarrassing lack of details of the miracle with some legendary additions. But these elaborations are as nothing compared to what we read in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. Starting from Matthew’s modest additions, the writer of this Gospel describes how two men, encircled by a great light, descend and rolled the stone away. Three men come out of the tomb, two supporting the third. The heads of the two reach as far as heaven, but the head of the third overtops the heavens. They are followed by a cross. A voice from heaven intones, ‘Hast thou preached to them that sleep?’ A voice from the cross pronounces, ‘Yea.’
All of which is so far-fetched it is no surprise this Gospel was not accepted for inclusion in the Bible. Nevertheless, the account does neatly illustrate just how shocking the missing second section of the original version was to Jewish sensibilities. Subsequent writers felt compelled to add something to plug the gap in the narration.
So how are we to account for the original missing section? The most straightforward explanation is that this was never meant as an ordinary Jewish miracle story to be added to all the others. It was a description of what actually happened. The reason the middle section is missing is that no one was around to witness at first hand how the resurrection occurred.
Examining the accounts in more detail reveals that they have all the hallmarks of being authentic eyewitness descriptions of what actually happened. In the first place, such accounts are unlikely to follow a structured logical sequence of the key points that need to be got across. Often you get inconsequential details that add nothing useful to the narration but are included simply because that is what happened. Thus we learn that two disciples ran to the tomb; the one who got there first did not go straight in but, for some unknown reason, waited for the other to come, and it was the latter who went in first. Who cares? One feels like protesting, ‘For goodness sake, get to the point.’ But it is included because that is the way it was.
Another feature of eyewitness accounts is that moments of shock are recalled particularly vividly. The witness is describing something that is still etched in their mind’s eye. Thus when the disciples enter the tomb they are shocked to find it empty. The scene stamps itself on their memory. They describe how the cloth that was over Jesus’ face was lying a little apart from the other clothes. A minor detail is mentioned only because they are in a sense describing a picture that is still before them in all its detail.
With real eyewitness accounts there can be features of one’s own behaviour which, embarrassingly, one finds difficult to explain. A familiar phrase is, ‘I simply don’t know what came over me.’ Thus we find Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Jesus in the garden outside the tomb and, for some unaccountable reason, not recognizing him but mistaking him for the gardener. Recognition only came when he spoke her name. This was of special significance for Mary. She had been a prostitute; men had treated her as a nameless sex object. But to Jesus she was not an anonymous object but someone to be respected and whose name was Mary. To be so addressed doubtless meant a lot to her.
The same sort of thing happened with the two followers of Jesus who, on being joined by the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, also did not recognize him. It was only when they were indoors having a meal and he broke bread with them that ‘their eyes were opened’. Why was the breaking of bread a trigger for recognition? These followers had not been present at the Last Supper but might well on occasion have had other meals with him. In any case, they would doubtless have heard the report of Jesus breaking bread the night he was betrayed and startling his hearers with the declaration that this was his body that they had to eat.
What alternative explanation can we have for the empty tomb? The priests at that time put around the story that the disciples must have stolen the body and made up the story of a resurrection. But why would they have done such a thing? Was it a last-ditch attempt to claim that, despite the disgrace and humiliation of dying the death of a criminal on the cross, Jesus was, nevertheless, the long-awaited Messiah? No. That cannot have been the reason because there had never been any expectation that the Messiah would undergo a resurrection.
Not only that but, if there had been such a conspiracy, wouldn’t the disciples have taken the trouble to get their story straight? Their accounts do not tie up. Matthew and Mark, for example, hold that Jesus’ resurrection appearances took place exclusively in Galilee. Luke describes them as taking place in or around Jerusalem. John has them occurring in both locations. Why the discrepancies? The most reasonable conclusion is that we are not dealing with a cunningly concocted story designed to deceive, but with various genuine, but sometimes faulty attempts to describe what actually happened. Eyewitness accounts are well known to be liable to have this further feature of being inconsistent. It is when schoolboys troop into the head teacher’s office and parrot identical stories about the fight in the playground that one suspects collusion.
In any case, what possible motive could the disciples have had for making up such a story? Immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus we read how the disciples were in hiding ‘for fear of the Jews’. They daren’t show their faces. And if they had dared to go out, what would their message have been? Not a silly story that he had come back to life again; no one was likely to take that seriously. In all probability it would have been to declare outrage at the gross injustice of a perfectly innocent man being wrongly accused and put to a shameful death. There is no more potent a rallying call than protesting the death of a martyr. But that was not what happened. Once they had got over their initial shocked reaction to Jesus’ death, we find them fearlessly out in the streets, not in protest at injustice but joyfully proclaiming a great victory. From then on they risked the wrath of the authorities and even martyrdom for themselves with the claim that Jesus had risen.
Indeed, the strongest evidence for the resurrection does not consist of arguments in favour of an empty tomb, but the dramatic transformation in the behaviour of Jesus’ followers. Something quite exceptional must have brought it about.
It is not for nothing that the very first accounts of the resurrection – not Mark’s Gospel, but the letters of Paul – do not tell us anything about an empty tomb but concentrate exclusively on Jesus’ appearances to his followers. For Paul the most important message he wanted to get across was the profound impact that the risen Jesus made on his followers, including the life-changing impact Jesus had on Paul himself through his own vision on the road to Damascus.
Summing up, one can say that, although many will remain so convinced of the finality of death they are unwilling or unable to accept Jesus’ resurrection, there is no getting away from the fact that the accounts we have of it could not appear more authentic than they are.
We have been examining the physical world to see whether it provides confirmatory evidence of the kind of God we appear to encounter through the otherness of our conscious experience. Probably the most important feature of that world is the presence of other human beings. This opens up a potentially fruitful new line of enquiry.
In getting to know God we have so far had to rely on what we have found in our own individual consciousness. But other people are also conscious. We can therefore explore whether their observations lead to the same sort of conclusions we have arrived at as to the nature of God. Indeed, it might turn out that they have been more perceptive and wise than ourselves in the interpretation of conscious experience. That being so, as with other areas of knowledge, we might learn from them. Knowledge is shared; we no longer have to go it alone.
What one finds is that, although there is no unanimity over the findings, vast numbers of people do indeed report the same type of experiences regarding getting to know God in this manner. So what are we to make of this?
One sometimes hears of there being a clear distinction between scientific and theological inquiry. Science is objective, theology subjective. With a scientific investigation we can jointly examine some physical phenomenon set out before us. We can agree over what we see happening, and arrive at a consensus as to what the explanation of it might be. When examining consciousness, however, one has access only to one’s own mind. We cannot jointly examine the same consciousness. So we are not working with the same objective data. We are engaged in separate private enterprises rather than a single venture.
Except that the distinction between the scientific and theological enterprises need not be as clear-cut as sometimes assumed. In my scientific work I find I am not in fact always examining the same data as some other scientist. It is more likely that I will conduct an experiment in my laboratory and the other scientist will repeat a similar experiment in his laboratory. I collect my set of data and he collects his. It is these two sets of data, drawn from separate experiments, that we compare. More often than not a scientific theory is confirmed not by scientists examining a single set of data, but by repeating the experiment, often under somewhat different circumstances to see if the results really are reproducible. That does not seem to me to be all that different from me comparing what I find in my consciousness with what you find in yours. And if we find the same feature present in both, then we are on to something that is objective and not some peculiar subjective quirk of an individual mind.
So it is we look to other people to learn more than can be gathered from one’s own direct experience of life. We prize particularly the insights of holy people gathered over the ages and set down in the Bible, the Qur’an and other holy writings.
We have just been examining an example of this. We saw, concerning the question of resurrection, that we can do our best to weigh up in our own mind the pros and cons of whether it is reasonable to believe in a life beyond this one. But ultimately the clearest indication comes from considering the experience of someone else, namely Jesus. Indeed, for Christians, Jesus was so transparent to the will of God – so in tune with the otherness of the mind as imprinted by God – that he was the perfect conduit for God to reach out to others. Though we might see something of God in those we meet from day to day, and this can be valuable, such revelations of God are always clouded by human imperfections. Jesus, according to Christians, was free of all such imperfections. Meeting up with him was in effect meeting up with God directly.
Thus communing with others and sharing insights becomes an integral part of enriching one’s understanding of God. In particular, we learn by mixing with fellow believers in the religious community to which we belong. It is not for nothing that one of Jesus’ first acts on embarking on his ministry was to gather a band of followers who could be of mutual help to each other. He instituted Holy Communion in the knowledge that this would ensure that they would keep together. He sent out his disciples in pairs, rather than alone, to carry out missionary work. He founded his Church on Peter. For Jesus, religion was not restricted to being but a private matter between the individual and God. If we are to enrich our understanding of God, we need to look to the world and especially to each other.