Who’s in Charge of the World’s Mysteries?

IN 1633, WHEN HE WAS SIXTY-NINE, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life by the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. The imprisonment lasted until his death in 1642. History records that Galileo received this condemnation because he published his now famous book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The two chief systems were the heliocentric (sun-centered) view of the solar system and the geocentric view (Earth-centered). In his Dialogue, and using the best scientific evidence available (evidence to which he contributed), Galileo argued for the heliocentric view and against the geocentric view favored by the Church. It wasn’t until 1758 that the Catholic Church dropped its prohibition against publishing books on heliocentrism. And it wasn’t until October 31, 1992, that the Church (Pope John Paul II) admitted that it had made a mistake with Galileo and the heliocentric theory, and cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing. It made this public four days later. Finally, in 2000, 367 years after the deed, the Church (again, in the person of Pope John Paul II) formally apologized for its treatment of Galileo.

It is common knowledge that the main force behind the Catholic Church’s condemnation was that Galileo’s argument clashed with the Bible. In the biblical texts, Psalm 93:1, 96:10, 104:5, and 1 Chronicles 16:30, we read that Earth does not and cannot be moved. But in Ecclesiastes 1:5, we read that sun does move. But far more than just biblical literalism was going on here. After all, the Bible was appealed to as an authority. Why would an authority be needed? Because the Catholic Church needed everything concerning the working of the ordinary world to be settled. Everything. The Church’s hegemonic power rested in large part on the idea that the mundane world was pretty much exactly as it appeared, and that the spiritual realm, with all its awesome mysteries, was revealed truth to which the Catholic Church had sole access. There were no mysteries at all in the secular world. All the mysteries relevant to a human’s life emanated from Catholic Christianity and from nowhere else.

Naturally, if the only important mysteries were the property of the Church, then the only deep explanations belonged to the Church as well. Science, therefore, was excluded both as a source of mystery and as a source of deep and powerful explanations. If questions arose about this ownership of truth, as they did when Galileo published his Dialogues, they could be completely and fully answered by appealing to the Bible . . . or to force, when the former strategy failed.

Galileo is important, therefore, not so much because he contradicted scripture, but because he radically changed the font of mystery and truth from a supernatural world managed and controlled by the Catholic Church to the secular world—the very world we live in every day. The Galilean lesson is that the deepest mysteries and the deepest explanations are free and available to everyone. They lie right in front of us. Armed with ordinary, competent schooling, average citizens have access to a world rich in strange and beautiful truths. A priestly class is not needed. A class consisting of those who are “specially chosen” is not needed. All that is needed is a single person with a desire to learn.

The Galilean lesson is in full force here. But I take matters one important step further. This book is primarily about scientific mysteries—profound, beautiful mysteries, accessible to everyone, which reveal that there’s more to our world than meets the eye, and more to our world than science has so far explained. Indeed, a major thesis of this book is that there is more to the world than science can explain. Unlike Galileo, I cannot argue for this thesis without first explicitly dealing with religion. So, this is also a book about the war between science and religion: about how science has won this war so thoroughly that it can explain why religion will not go away, why there are people who choose God over science. How are these two topics related? Understanding how science explains religion will sweep away the debris concealing the true importance of what many regard as science’s shortcomings: the mysteries. But I will argue that revealing these mysteries is science’s greatest accomplishment. And I say this while very mindful of science’s stunning successes and world-altering accomplishments.

I have structured this book, loosely, as a travelogue, as the progress report of a sort of journey—a journey to a realm revealed by science, but unexplained by it. I did this for one reason. I want to move the reader, at least temporarily, from religious mysteries to the scientific ones. I want the reader to come to see the scientific mysteries as not only beautiful, but as every bit as important to being human as any religious mystery. This task is best accomplished in steps, the big ones being, firstly, understanding the nature of spiritual journeys; secondly, understanding how science explains the existence of all human religions; and finally, understanding how the scientific mysteries are more than mere puzzles to be solved. So, this book is a modern Pilgrim’s Progress. But unlike John Bunyan’s famous Christian allegory (1678), Excellent Beauty is not an allegory: the reader can actually take the journey just by reading this book. Most spiritual journeys are encounters with spiritual teachers. Consequently, the stories of such journeys always leave something out, namely, the actual, physical teacher encountered. But this journey is instead an encounter with ideas, and unlike human teachers, ideas don’t lose substance when reported. And these ideas are free and available to everyone of every creed, from every walk of life. So the encounter is right here in these pages.

The first major idea encountered is that religion is biological. The world’s religions are an evolutionary response to a difficult planet. But in the usual clashes between science and religion, especially in the last two hundred or so years, science wins, and the debris left over is assumed to be mundane, bereft of spirit, and unable to speak to human longing for a universe bigger than our understanding. This has always been incorrect. Mundane debris is a myth we tell ourselves because we are in the grip of religion. Biology is ending religion, but a boring, mechanical world, fully laid bare by theories and equations, is not what is left over. Instead, an exciting, perplexing, mysterious world is revealed, a world that could speak to human longing, if we were to challenge religion’s tyrannical definition of what such longing should be. In matters of the spirit, it is not science that is the problem, it is religion.

But in matters of deeply understanding the nature of the world, it is not religion that is the problem, it is science. Many scientists revel in a world that is flatly natural. This seems to be the world they want to live in, and they bridle when this want is thwarted. But the journey recorded here reveals that this interpretation is wrong. The world is not flatly natural. This is the conclusion that science actually reveals to us.

In part 1 of the book, the journey begins. I define the term “religion,” since if science is going to explain it, it would be nice to know what it is. I don’t define “science,” relying rather on the reader’s intuitive notions. I also introduce the One Billion—the one billion nonreligious people on planet Earth—currently the third most common religious preference. And finally, I discuss the eventual and deep disappointment that every spiritual traveler has to come to terms with. Some overcome this; others do not. But it’s this disappointment’s existence and ubiquity that are most relevant to us. This topic requires discussion of, among other things, the problem of evil: how could a good god allow evil? Part 2 is where I make the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. This conclusion is actually forced on us; there is no other explanation for the stunning quantity and diversity of religious practice, coupled with religion’s iron grip on human rationality. If we count varieties, there are tens of thousands of religions on planet Earth, and religious belief persists in the face of stunning and compelling counter evidence. One important consequence of this evolutionary view is that religion is rendered useless for grounding morality. So, I also offer some ways that morality can be grounded in the natural world without using any religion at all. The truths discovered in parts 1 and 2, however, prove to be anathema to any spiritual journey. Part 3 is about this. The idea is that by part 3, any spiritual journey will have come apart at the seams. Almost nothing will be left. However, in part 4, a new direction is discovered: there is some strangeness in the proportion. And this strangeness offers to reinvigorate the traveler with hope, beauty, and even meaning, of a new sort. We see this strangeness in the scientific mysteries. These mysteries are really the central topic of this book and are discussed in chapter 10. Consequences of the existence of scientific mysteries are discussed in chapters 11, 12, and 13. Then, finally, the journey ends, successfully: the universe we inhabit is revealed to contain deep and important mysteries at which we are invited to marvel but which we cannot explain and cannot explain away.