God comes knocking on the door of science

Science at the Doorstep to God:
Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death
Fr Robert Spitzer, S.J.
Ignatius Press
October 2023
299 pages
ISBN 9781621646365

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Are scientists really atheists? What can science do and what can it not do? Can it at least help understand whether the universe needs an intelligent creator? Can it throw light on the human soul as transphysical, capable of surviving bodily death?

Fr Robert Spitzer believes it can, by offering a combination of converging arguments, as St John Henry Newman does in The Grammar of Assent. Author of Evidence for God from Contemporary Physics and articles about astrophysics and cosmology, Fr Spitzer has navigated the connections and disconnections between faith and science in a balanced and wise way, rather in the spirit of Fr Georges Lemaȋtre, proposer of the Big Bang, of whom he has much to write in this book. In this book he shows that eight recent studies confirm the existence of an intelligent creator of physical reality as well as a transphysical soul which survives bodily death

Did the universe have a beginning?

He begins by asking whether science points to a beginning of the universe. There have been many theories about the cause of our universe: infinite or finite multiverses, a bouncing universe that waxes and wanes, of which our universe is just an interlude, a string of universes, and an infinite steady state quantum cosmology, which also would predate “our” universe, initiated by the Big Bang. All of these theories, however, either require a beginning anyway, or else are incompatible with the facts, according to the best scientists in the area, whose arguments Spitzer rehearses in detail, but readably for the layman.

So was the Big Bang really the beginning? All the indications are that it was: you can’t have an expanding universe without a beginning; entropy would long ago have killed our universe if it were infinite, and so, if physical reality had a beginning, prior to which there was nothing, we are left with a “something” beyond physical reality which can cause it all, that is, create it out of nothing. Sounds familiar?

Life, the impossible

How about the extraordinary and unlikely fine-tuning which was needed for life to emerge? Sir Fred Hoyle, an adamant atheist, after discovering the need for exceedingly precise fine-tuning in the resonance levels of oxygen, carbon, helium, and beryllium needed for carbon bonding and carbon abundance, concluded that “some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom”.

Spitzer’s most challenging chapter rehearses the background and subsequent development of this point. Spitzer looks long and hard at all of the other options, and comes to the conclusions that it is “virtually impossible” for life to have emerged: the creator (or whatever) would have had to aim at a tiny (1/10^10/123 ) volume of the available space. This figure is so unimaginably small (the denominator has so many figures if it were written out the solar system could not contain it) that most physicists agree that it is impossible to hit it. Low entropy, the cosmological constant, the ratio of mass to energy straight after the Big Bang also point to an “impossible” achievement. But it has been achieved; so how did it happen?

Many hypotheses have been tried; string theory, cyclic or bouncing cosmologies, the multiverse… All of them cause the problems that they were trying to solve: they require a beginning, they are unobservable, and actually make it impossible in principle to observe what we actually are observing and to be what we actually are: carbon-based intelligent life forms. We really do need an “unrestricted transphysical/transmaterial conscious intelligence” to ground our universe.

Can we disprove God?

Impossible. Neither observable evidence nor intrinsic contradiction could ever manage that, since the God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam is beyond observation, unlike the “god” which is denied by Richard Dawkins & Co. But, more positively, can God’s existence be proved? Spitzer offers a basic Aquinas-style demonstration: there must be a unique and unrestricted uncaused reality at the basis of the whole of reality, or else there would will be nothing at all, since everything else depends on it here and now. Such a reality will be spiritual, completely intelligible and unrestrictedly intelligent, aware of the what, why and wherefore of all caused realities.

Is human intelligence all that special?

A central theme of the book is an analysis of near-death experience, as evidence for a transphysical soul. Spitzer uses peer-reviewed studies which offer a well-judged and careful analysis of the facts. We have evidence of blind people being able to see perfectly and identify surroundings; terminal lucidity in Alzheimer and hydrocephalic patients with almost no cerebral activity, leading to the question: “is the brain really necessary?”

Could we have simply evolved materially to being intelligent animals? For Noam Chomsky, for instance, this will not work. We need to communicate knowledge, with declarative sentences. The once fashionable behaviourism is not at the races when it comes to this phenomenon, involving complex declarative sentences which associate subjects with predicate/object with multiple words between them, etc. Behaviourists just can’t cope with long sentences.

Another argument for the transphysical soul: For Thomas Nagel, atheist author of What is it Like to Be a Bat?, there is a subjective “feel” about being an organism which goes beyond the actual organic make-up of the being. Facts about self-consciousness, therefore, are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts. There is something about consciousness that requires a transphysical principle, since we can also reflect on ourselves, project ourselves into the future and have an awareness of our own inner world, distinct from the outer world we are inhabiting; even higher primates are unable to do this.

Transcendent experiences

Spitzer’s final chapter deals with religious experience, conscience, and the transcendental desire for perfect truth, love, goodness beauty and being/home are all matters which paint a picture of a truly material, carbon-based being, which still cannot be completely explained in a material way.

He concludes that when you take into account the beginning of the universe, the impossible fine-tuning for life, the fact that the world cannot explain itself, scientifically accepted near-death experiences, the irreducibility of self-consciousness and the transcendent religious, moral and aesthetic experiences it gives rise to, there is a converging series of indications of God and the soul which it is difficult to ignore. Science is at the doorstep to God, as Fr Spitzer claims, and the more we are able to reflect on its findings the more open we become to God’s existence and the reality of the spiritual soul.