For the last couple of years since writing my book, “A History of the Goddess,” I have spent a lot of time listening to debates between atheists and believers over the existence of God and other spiritual matters. My spiritual views were challenged and deepened through these conversations and I would like to take this moment to sum up my views as I feel I have arrived at a solid position and going forward I am returning to the energy and climate change work that was always my first passion.
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On the question of atheism and God, people fall into one of two camps.
First, there are the materialists\objectivists who view the world in strictly material terms, this is the classic view of the Enlightenment that we are taught in school in the West. In this worldview, everything in the universe can be described by natural forces, physics, and math. The only acceptable truth is truth that can be demonstrated rationally on the material plane of existence with tangible, observable evidence that adheres to the scientific method. In this world view, there is no God, no soul, and by extension, no free will, merely the illusion of free will. Religion and spirituality are magical thinking and delusional myth-making that result from existential fear about the nature of our fragile and perilous existence.
There is a thriving movement of atheists that follows the success of prominent intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss, and others. There are online atheist communities like the Atheist Community of Austin (Texas), the new Onlysky.media website, and many atheist YouTubers who enjoy deconstructing Christianity and Islam. There is no question that atheism is a growing intellectual movement, particularly on the liberal left that sees themselves politically and culturally opposed to Christian conservatives.
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On the other side of the materialists are the people who see a non-material plane of reality that is every bit as real as the material plane. It is in the non-material plane that we find God, souls, and the spark of free will. We can call these people spiritualists.
The spiritualists can offer no tangible proof for their belief in the spiritual plane that will satisfy the materialists. There is no scientific evidence for God or for souls, nothing corporeal that can be measured, discerned, or recorded as data. The very nature of the non-material plane is that it is intangible and lies beyond human comprehension or understanding. People have an intuitive sense and faith in the reality of the non-material plane, but they can’t provide a concrete description of what it is or how it functions. The non-material plane can only be described with allegories, poetry, myths, and stories. In short, the spiritualist must rely on fiction and analogy to explain their point of view.
The objectivist mocks the spiritualist for their “magical thinking” and proudly proclaims that physics and natural laws can describe everything that is actually real, and this is true, almost. Physics can describe just about everything, but not quite everything. Physics and science are tremendous tools with powerful explanatory value but there are limits, and the cutting edge of physics confronts the strict materialist with unresolved questions.
The problem for the objectivist worldview is that there are some extremely important aspects of our daily lives that physics has no explanation for. These non-tangible elements of existence are known as emergent properties. There are many emergent properties in nature, but the most important ones for this discussion are the emergent properties of consciousness, life, and creation. These vital aspects of the human experience cannot be measured or understood by any known science, they don’t correlate to physics and they present a fundamental challenge to the objectivist worldview.
The irony is that mystics have been teaching us for centuries upon centuries that the emergent properties of consciousness, life, and creation are completely intertwined on the spiritual plane. As far back as Plato and Socrates in ancient Greece, and probably even earlier, philosophers and sages have been saying that if you want to know God, first “know yourself.” The Gnostic Christians taught this message, and so do Eastern traditions of meditation.
The kingdom is inside you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.
- Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
Contemporary models of physics cannot describe consciousness, it cannot be measured, assigned to a particular part of the body, or accurately modeled in mechanistic terms. This is a known challenge in biology and philosophy. Physicists don’t even have a good definition of what consciousness even is, but we know from Rene Descartes that consciousness is perhaps the only thing in life that we can say for certain is real.
I think therefore I am.
- Rene Descartes, 1637
Our entire reality may be an illusion, we may be plugged into the Matrix, like in the movie, or perhaps our brains are in a jar being subjected to electrical stimulation like in the Futurama TV show. We can’t say for certain that our reality is real, we could be being tricked, the only thing we know for sure is that we are thinking. Our thoughts may be deranged and insane but we know we are having them. Our consciousness is the only thing in our lives that we know is real and yet physics can’t explain it at all.
Similarly, physics cannot describe the emergent property of life. There is nothing tangible that can be measured at the moment a living thing dies or comes into existence. There is nothing that can be discerned on a scope or instrument that distinguishes the transition from life to death. Likewise, there is nothing in physics that describes why an agglomeration of carbon, water, oxygen, and other molecules come together as a biological life form.
Physics tells us that matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, they merely change form. So when a living creature dies, where does that life force go and where did it come from? What is the substance of “life?” Physics can not say but we know for sure that life is real.
Finally, creation. As with the other emergent properties, physics cannot describe the creation of the universe. Physics gives us the Big Bang which tells us the time the universe was born and we can observe the library of natural forces such as electromagnetism and gravity that control the physical movements of objects through the universe. But there is nothing in these physics models that tells us why the Big Bang took place, what came before, or why the universe took the form that it did. Physics presumes the existence of natural laws like thermodynamics, evolution, and mathematics but has no explanation for their arrival. Creation and natural laws are emergent properties of the universe with no adequate accounting for their existence.
The materialist must admit that their physics-based worldview does not account for these emergent properties, and to be fair these are known problems that public intellectuals wrestle with and debate. Their general attitude is that any problem science cannot answer today will be resolved in due time, but that comes as a matter of faith.
The spiritualist has no problem explaining consciousness, life, and creation because they are all wrapped up in the non-material plane and their personal belief in God (whatever form that takes). The problem for the spiritualist is that they are forced to use allegories and myths to describe their conception of the non-material plane and this presentation never satisfies the strict materialist.
Both the materialist and the spiritualist can make strong cases for their position and both sides have glaring weaknesses their opponents can exploit in a debate. This leaves us in a stand-off and circular discussion that has been going on for centuries.
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Quantum mechanics is the cutting edge of physics and a very famous experiment may offer our most convincing evidence of the non-material plane. In a thought experiment known as Schrodinger’s Cat, it was demonstrated that by merely observing sub-atomic particles the viewer impacted the result of the experiment. I will not attempt to explain the sub-atomic particle theories at work, there is an entire library of books on this subject if you are interested. The key takeaway is that simply observing the experiment affected the results, and this has profound implications on the nature of consciousness and reality.
Many different explanations have been offered for Schrodinger’s Cat, but one of the possible implications is that consciousness affects material reality and may even predate material reality. I am not one to weigh in on quantum mechanics, but I recognize that the implications of these experiments lead us back to a sense of mysticism that the materialists reject but cannot account for.
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Personally, I find the existence of the spiritual plane to be instinctive and self-evident and I couldn’t pretend to not see it, the alternative is truly soulless. I don’t have any profound new evidence or arguments that will satisfy the strict objectivists, but I do find the correlation that traditional mystical beliefs pick up precisely where we hit the limits of science and physics to be convincing enough for me. Of course, I can only use allegories to describe my views, mythical explanations like soul, God, and Goddess, but so be it.
Though I find some of Dodge’s historical insights interesting and enjoyable, this sounds like another version of the “god of the gaps” argument. I think science – ie observation, testing, creating the most plausible theories from data – characterizes reality well in a complex version of “the total is greater than the sum of its parts.” Mystics are said to be those curious about the universe but who are too lazy to learn physics. Every religious person I’ve ever met has a deep irrational desire simply to believe, and that ultimately is the source of their belief.