Preface of Buddhism and Science - by Donald Lopez

In BUDDHISM AND SCIENCE: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED, Dr. Donald Lopez critically considers the compatibility of Buddhism and Science. He takes a step back from the generally taken for granted notion that they mesh almost seamlessly---something of which we are also guilty! Lopez writes, “This book surveys the long history of the discourse of Buddhism and Science in an effort to understand why we yearn for the teachings of an itinerant mendicant in Iron Age India, even one of such profound insight, to somehow anticipate the formulae of Einstein.” Dr. Lopez is a Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.The passage below was excerpted from BUDDHISM AND SCIENCE, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2008 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

In the winter of 1870—71, Ernst Johann Eitel (1838—1908), a member of the London Missionary Society~ delivered a series of lectures on Buddhism at the Union Church in Hong Kong. Eitel was one of the great missionary-scholars of the Victorian period, an accomplished sinologist who also read Sanskrit. His ultimate goal was to demonstrate the falsity of Buddhism. Yet in his third lecture, he enumerated some of the ways in which Buddhism had anticipated science:

Though no Buddhist ever attained to the clearer insight and mathematical analysis of a Copernicus, Newton, Laplace or Herschel, it must be acknowledged that Buddhism fore-stalled in several instances the most splendid discoveries of modern astronomy. Teaching the origin of each world to have taken place out of a cloud, the Buddhists anticipated 2ooo years ago Herschel’s nebular hypothesis. And when those very patches of cloudy light or diffused nebulosities which Herschel believed to be “diffused matter hastening to a world birth” dissolved themselves before the monster telescope of Lord Rosse into as many assemblages of suns, into thousands of other world-systems dispersed through the wilds of boundless space, modern astronomy was but verifying the more ancient Buddhistic dogma of a plurality of worlds, of the co-existence of thousands of chiliocosmoi inhabited by multitudes of living beings.

Eitel invokes five great names in the history of astronomy: Nicolas Copernicus (1473—1543), whose On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) presented the heliocentric theory of the universe; Sir Isaac Newton (1643—1727), who invented the refracting telescope and explained the role of gravity in planetary motion; Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749—1827), who developed mathematical methods for calculating and predicting the motion of the planets; William Herschel (1738—1822), discoverer of Uranus and cataloger of nebulae; and William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse (1800—1867), who in 1844 built the “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” the world’s largest telescope. Each of these figures would have been well known to Eitel’s expatriate audience in the Hong Kong church.

Laplace and Herschel were associated with the nebular hypothesis, a theory previously propounded by both Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant, which postulated that a solar system originated from a mass of incandescent gas—for Herschel it was a shining fluid that he called “true nebulosity”—rotating on an axis, eventually contracting into a mass. The outer rings of this mass broke off to form planets, with the central core becoming their sun. One of the great debates in astronomy in the nineteenth century was whether this incandescent fluid indeed existed or whether it was instead a mass of distant stars. In early 1846, Rosse and his monster telescope showed that the Orion Nebula could in fact be resolved into stars.

These were some of the latest scientific discoveries of Eitel’s day. And he claims that they have been “forestalled” (by which he means “anticipated”) two thousand years ago by the Buddhists. Eitel is referring to a Buddhist account of the origin of the world. Faint winds, impelled by the force of karma, begin to blow in the vacuity of space, eventually converging to form a circle of wind, described as solid and indestructible. A thick cloud forms above the circle of wind, raining down drops of water of various sizes that together become a great ocean, supported on the circle of wind. In this ocean, a thousand golden lotus flowers appear. The churning of the ocean eventually gives rise to a ring of mountains that contains the waters. In the center of the ocean, a great mountain appears, with an island (flanked by two smaller islands) in each of the four cardinal directions. This is a world, and a thousand of these worlds is a Buddhist universe, what Eitel calls a “thousand world” or chiliocosm.

Eitel sees in the Buddhist rain cloud an anticipation of Herschel’s nebulae, and in the Buddhist “thousand world” an anticipation of galaxies, anticipated without the assistance of Rosse’s giant lens.These worlds were inhabited by “multitudes of living beings.” Eitel, in keeping with the views of many astronomers of his day, believed that the planets were populated. Indeed, late in life, Herschel had published a paper arguing that the sun was inhabited, with two layers of dense clouds protecting the inhabitants from the intense light of the luminous shell observed from earth; sunspots may be the peaks of tall mountains rising through the shell.

We see, then, a Christian missionary, almost a century and half ago, making grudging claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and Science. Over the ensuing decades, such claims have continued to be made with a remarkable persistence. This book is a study of that persistence.

Its central claim is a modest one. It is that in order to understand the conjunction of the terms Buddhism and Science, it is necessary to understand something of the history of the conjunction. It might be dated back to the sixteenth century, when Saint Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary to Japan, noted that the Buddhists do not understand that the world is round. It might be traced back to the Reverend Dr. Eitel’s lectures from his Hong Kong pulpit. Or it might be traced to the year 1873, when the Wesleyan minister David da Silva in Sri Lanka held up a globe during a debate with a Buddhist monk and asked him to locate Mount Meru, the cosmic peak that rose from the waters to form the center of the Buddhist world. That these events occurred in the course of Christian missions to Buddhist Asia suggests that Buddhist claims about Science originated in polemic, with Buddhists arguing that their religion is not superstition but science. Yet such claims have persisted after the opponent in that polemic has disappeared, or has at least become less visible. And the claims of compatibility have not always originated among Asian Buddhists. The discourse of Buddhism and Science has been transmitted through networks that crisscross the nebulous boundaries of East and West. Asian Buddhists have argued for the compatibility in order to validate their Buddhism. European and American enthusiasts and devotees have argued for the compatibility in order to exoticize Science, to find it validated in the insights of an ancient Asian sage.

A second assertion of this book is that for more than 150 years, the claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and Science have remained remarkably similar, both in their content and in their rhetorical form. This similarity has persisted despite major shifts in what is meant by Buddhism and what is meant by Science. In the early decades of this history, Buddhism generally referred to what European scholars dubbed “original Buddhism,” the Buddhism of the Pali canon, preserved in the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. In the period after the Second World War, although the Theravada continued to be regarded as “Buddhism” in some quarters, Zen came to the fore. And since the 1990s, Tibetan Buddhism has displaced Zen to become the chief referent of Buddhism in the Buddhism and Science dialogue, largely through the influence of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Still, over the course of almost a century and a half, the Buddha is said to have somehow anticipated the most up-to-date view of modern science as thousands of pages of the calendar have been turned.

The referent of Science is also nebulous. At times, science has meant a method of sober and rational investigation, with the claim that the Buddha made use of such a method to arrive at the knowledge of deep truths about inner and outer worlds. At other times, science refers to a specific theory: the mechanistic universe, the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, the big bang, whose antecedents are to be found in Buddhist doctrine. At other times, science has referred to a specific technology— the microscope, the telescope, the spectrometer—that has been used to discover what the Buddha knew without the aid of such instruments; as more precise instruments have been developed over the past century, the claims of the Buddha’s knowledge have remained constant. And at still other times, science has referred to the manipulation of matter, with dire consequences for humanity unless paired with the compassionate vision of the Buddha.

From the traditional perspective, the Buddhist truth is timeless; the Buddha understood the nature of reality fully at the moment of his enlightenment, and nothing beyond that reality has been discovered since. From this perspective, then, the purpose of all Buddhist doctrine and practice that have developed over the two and a half millennia is to make manifest the content of the Buddha’s enlightenment. From the historical perspective, the content of the Buddha’s enlightenment is irretrievable, and what is called Buddhism has developed in myriad forms across centuries and continents, with these forms linked by their retrospective gaze to the solitary sage seated beneath a tree. From either perspective, in order to make this “Buddhism” compatible with “Science,” Buddhism must be severely restricted, eliminating much of what has been deemed essential, whatever that might be, to the exalted monks and ordinary laypeople who have gone for refuge to the Buddha over the course of more than two thousand years.

If something is lost, what is gained? This book surveys the long history of the discourse of Buddhism and Science in an effort to understand why we yearn for the teachings of an itinerant mendicant in Iron Age India, even one of such profound insight, to somehow anticipate the formulae of Einstein.

In the Beginning, 13.73 Billion Years Ago - by Howard Smith

The following piece by Howard Smith hits a more mystical note than many of our recent posts. Like big bang theorists, it points out, the kabbalists, “…weave an intricate account of the universe created from [an] infinitesimal speck, describing how it expanded and evolved with light and substance into our world.” The article was originally featured in THE FORWARD, a weekly Jewish newspaper, on October 13, 2006. Dr. Smith is an active member of the Boston Jewish community. He is a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and was the chairman of the astronomy department at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. His recent book is LET THERE BE LIGHT: MODERN COSMOLOGY AND KABBALAH, A NEW CONVERSATION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION (New World Library) — http://www.lettherebelightbook.com/. Several of his other recent articles on the topic of science and religion can be found in the Excerpts section of the site.

"B'Resheit" - Hebrew for "in the beginning."

from The Hebrew Bible published by the Society of Jewish Bibliophiles in Germany, the Soncino Gesellschaft, 1933. http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/guide/hs-intro.html

Since the start of the Hebrew month of Elul in late August, Jews have been examining the year past in search of lessons to apply to the year ahead. Now, as the holiday season winds to a close, the weekly cycle of Torah readings offers another opportunity to examine the past as we return to the study of the very beginning: Genesis and the story of creation. This year, modern science has something new to add.

The medieval commentator Rashi famously asks why the Torah, nominally a book of laws, begins with a seemingly incidental cosmology narrative. He answers, citing a midrash, that the account is included to demonstrate to all the nations that God created the Earth, and that the land of Israel can therefore be given to whomever God chooses. Land belongs not to people, but to the Lord.

Some 500 years after Rashi, the kabbalists of Safed developed their own perspective on the lessons of the Torah’s cosmology. They built on a different midrash on Genesis, one formulated by the first-century rabbi Yonah and cited in the “Beresheit Rabbah.”

Yonah asks, in the name of his teacher, why the Torah begins with the letter Bet — בּ}}. His answer is that this letter is shaped like a bracket — ] — closed behind, above and beneath, so that “we have no permission to discuss what is above or below, in front or in back, only onwards from the moment of creation.”

The first mark in scripture then, after that signifying bracket, is the tiny dot inside the Bet that hardens its sound from “v” to “b.” This dot signifies the primal point of creation, the embryonic universe, what the kabbalists called the “Resheit.” “Beyond this point,” says the Zohar, “nothing is known, and so it is called the Resheit, the first word of all.” The Torah’s literal opening statement is thus, “With the Resheit God created the heavens and the Earth.”

Triangulum Galaxy

the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, N. Caldwell and B. McLeod.
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2006/pr200619.html

The kabbalists weave an intricate account of the universe created from this infinitesimal speck, describing how it expanded and evolved with light and substance into our world. Like Rashi, the kabbalists derive a lesson from their cosmology: Humanity has a role in this drama. They explain that the work of creation has not been completed.

Tikkun olam is humanity’s task — to heal the breaches and injustices of our society, imperfections that were embedded in the very fabric of the newly formed cosmos. The import of these lessons remains as appropriate today as ever, as we educe new interpretations from these old teachings.

There are also new teachings in the cosmological story, and some other lessons to derive as well. This has been another remarkable year for astronomers investigating how the universe was actually created — yes, today we know how the creation really did proceed. Readers may perhaps recall the essence of those ideas; they are expressed in the big bang model.

About 13 billion years ago, the universe as we know it exploded from an infinitesimally small point, much smaller than even an atomic nucleus, in a creative event dubbed “the big bang.” The universe has been expanding from this point and evolving ever since, with its current dimension being approximately 46 billion light-years. The foundations for the big bang description were laid by decades of mathematical thinking and meticulous studies that culminated with Edwin Hubble’s unexpected 1929 observation: Other galaxies are moving away from us with velocities that indicate a systematic recession, but yet, in accord with Albert Einstein’s then recent theory of relativity, the Earth has no privileged position. Hubble’s results shocked people who only a few years earlier thought that our galaxy was the entire universe and that — as Einstein, too, had originally thought — the universe was static and eternal.

Hubble’s data made use of 46 nearby galaxies. This past year, several different teams of astronomers reported progress on their programs to measure the recession velocities of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. Their results — with evidence from galaxies hundreds of times farther away than Hubble’s sample — support Hubble’s conclusion that the universe is systematically expanding.

There was other news as well. The newborn universe was tiny and fantastically hot, and its light was scattered by the plasma of electrons like headlights in a fog. Three hundred and eighty thousand years after the big bang, once the universe had cooled down enough for neutral atoms to assemble, light was finally able to travel through space unimpeded. That light is seen today as the so-called “cosmic microwave background radiation,” and it permeates all of space. It is faint — but it is everywhere.

The cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in the 1960s, and like the recession of galaxies, it has become one of the essential diagnostic features used to investigate the details of exactly what happened in the beginning. In 1989, NASA launched a small satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, to measure this radiation more precisely. Just last month, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two astronomers who, with their teams, designed the explorer. NASA now has a newer cosmology satellite in orbit, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Last month this satellite team announced the results of the first three years of nonstop surveying of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The universe, the probe satellite team reports, is 13.73 billion years old, with a formal statistical uncertainty in that number of only about 1%, or about 150 million years — less time than it took for the dinosaurs to come and go. (The team also measured another half-dozen fundamental properties of the universe with similar precision.) Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the various galaxy studies have bolstered our confidence in our understanding of the early universe, and solidified ideas that would have seemed completely ludicrous a century ago — ludicrous to scientists, that is, though not to kabbalists.

The same remarkable astronomical research, however, has simultaneously uncovered stunning new mysteries. The universe is not simply expanding, it appears to be accelerating outward into endless oblivion. Astronomers can account for only a paltry 10% of cosmic matter as being in known forms like planets, stars, galaxies or gaseous nebulae. The other 90% of substance is “dark matter,” almost certainly some kind of unknown material.

Einstein’s hoped-for theory to unite gravity and the other three forces of nature remains unrealized. The rigor with which the cosmic age has been determined only lends credence to the profundity of these three mysteries and other ones still remaining.

Like the cosmology of Rashi and the Safed kabbalists, modern cosmology also lends itself to a message and a lesson. The message is that our basic concepts about the universe are well-founded: The universe is not eternal and static; it was born, has evolved and is expanding. Yes, there are deep puzzles remaining, but we have increasing confidence in the scientific methods needed to resolve them.

The lesson comes when applying these realizations to the current political debates that have regrettably presented science and religion as antagonists — evolution, intelligent design, stem-cell research and human behaviors, to name a few. In the case of astronomy, and more generally as well, both science and religion are speaking to the same mysteries. In the arena of cosmology they offer perspectives that, though different, are consonant, not contradictory — as I hope the example of the Kabbalah illustrates.

Science and religion should therefore be partners, not adversaries, in the effort to fashion sensible and fair political solutions. In this coming year of 5767 we owe it to ourselves to be more tolerant of divergent opinions, to abandon defensive and bitter rhetoric in favor of open inquiry and respectful listening, and to become better informed about the marvelous nature of the world which, as per Genesis 1, was created with language, and judged to be “very good.”

Terrence Deacon's "Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub" - summary by Lois Isenman

Terrence Deacon’s article, “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub,” helps bring some clarity to the compelling but poorly defined concept of emergence, which is often used to describe the spontaneous production of order. Deacon describes three hierarchical levels of emergence, and in so doing he provides important scientific context for the Eastern concept of co-dependent arising.The article echoes the previous piece by physicist Paul Davies, which places the origin of the laws of nature within the universe itself.

“Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub” appears in THE RE-EMERGENCE OF EMERGENCE: THE EMERGENTIST HYPOTHESIS FROM SCIENCE TO RELIGION, a book edited by Philip Clayton (see The Emergence of Spirit) and Paul Davies (Taking Science on Faith). Terrence Deacon is a professor of Biological Anthropology and Linguistics at UC Berkeley and is also the author of THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES: CO-EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN.

Causality used to be a much more complex issue than it is today. Aristotle recognized four distinct kinds of causes—material, efficient, formal, and final. Deacon writes, “If we use the example of carpentry, material cause is what determines the structural stability of a house, efficient cause is the carpenter’s modification of materials to create the structure, formal cause is the plan followed in this construction process, and final cause is the aim of the process, that is, producing a space protected from the elements. A final cause is that 'for the sake of which' something is done.”

This rich panoply of causes has been reduced to only one, efficient cause, in our scientific age. Renaissance thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza took particular offense at the notion of final cause.Deacon says, “As exemplified by the early explanations of the power of vacuums and buoyancy, only 'pushes' [not pulls] seemed allowable as determinants of the efficacy and direction of physical changes."

In contrast, the concept of final causality, or purpose, suggests that ends come first and determine means. This gives the impression that time is running backwards, as does the spontaneous production of order that characterizes many natural processes. By exploring various levels of the spontaneous emergence of order, Deacon aims to recontextualize our sense of final causality, especially as it relates to the evolution of life and to mind.He asks, “Is there someway to identify a real and substantial sense of the 'pull' of future possibilities in terms of 'pushes' from the past?" Such a perspective allows the future, which is an absence from the point of view of the present, to become pregnant with possibility and thus to cause. He quotes from the Tao Te Ching:

“Thirty spokes converged at the wheel's hub to an empty space that makes it useful. Clay is shaped into a vessel, to take advantage of the emptiness it surrounds.Doors and windows are cut into walls of a room so that it can serve some function. Though we must work with what is there, use comes from what is not there.”

Deacon elaborates, "Here we are confronted with a different sense of causality, in the form of an 'affordance': a specifically constrained range of possibilities, a potential that is created by virtue of something missing." Deacon uses this notion of absence, of something being shaped by what is missing, to help unify three different progressively more complex levels of emergence. He calls them non-recurrent, simple recurrent and hyper recurrent, or alternatively, first, second, and third order emergence, or thermodynamic, morphodynamic and teleodynamic emergence.

He defines emergence as "unprecedented global regularity generated within a composite system by virtue of higher-order consequences of the interaction of composite parts." Certain non-canceling regularities of relationship of lower-level constituents reinforce and amplify each other at higher levels. “…[H]igher order properties then can be created that effectively 'drag along' component constituent dynamics, even though these higher order regularities are constituted by lower-order interactions....By means of these circles, nature tangles its causal chains into complex knots in such a way that the global effects can come to resemble a reversal of time.”

With first order, or thermodynamic emergence, higher-order properties emerge from aggregates, for example liquid phenomena—such as surface tension and laminar or turbulent flow—characteristic of water molecules. Numbers matter to emergent properties, in contrast to other molecular properties, such as atomic composition and mass, which are invariant across scale.A single water molecule is not a liquid; liquid properties are due to the relationships between molecules. In repeated interactions, the characteristics of individual water molecules, for example their charge or internal vibration, distribute so as to cancel each other.This leaves only relational properties, or how molecules fit together, which are non-canceling, to characterize the aggregate. Liquid properties are new properties that emerge from the aggregate, even though they can be described in reductive terms.

Many different types of molecules can amass into liquids. There are "... many possible ways that different micro-details of structure and interaction can converge to produce the same higher-order properties. A given higher-order liquid property 'supervenes' on specific lower-order interactions to the extent that the former always entails the latter, but the vast iterative dynamics of these interactions also has a variety-canceling effect that converges to similar results across a wide range of substrates and modes of interaction."

In thermodynamic emergence, the uniformity of the higher order properties leaves no way for biases—or non-canceling regularities—to reinforce complementary biases at lower levels. In contrast in self-organizing, or morphodynamic systems, “…interaction dynamics at lower levels becomes strongly affected by regularities emerging at higher levels of organization.” Thermodynamic emergence becomes unstable; with continuing perturbations, these biases at higher levels can come to overwhelm cancellation. In Bernard cells, for example, water of uniform depth heated from below, under certain conditions, forms regular hexagonal cells of rising hot and falling cool liquid. This bias or higher-level regularity comes about because various other “unstable patterns of convection cancel each other out.” Regular hexagonal cells allow for the most efficient dissipation of heat.

Figure 5.2 from original article: reprinted with permission

Benard cell dynamics. Left: A tracing of a photo of Benard cells forming in a heated dish, showing their approximate hexagonal symmetry (though distorted by the constraints of the circular edge of the dish). Right: A diagram of the convection current pattern for a single Benard cell in stable dynamical configuration.

Snow crystal growth also reflects a self organizing system. Instability here comes about by the continuous addition of similar units. Three factors converge: 1) the hexagonal micro-structural lattice derived from the symmetry of the water molecule, 2) the radial symmetry of heat dissipation, and 3) the complex history of the changing temperature, pressure, and humidity of the developing crystal, as new units are added, as well as the subsequent history of the aggregate.Each prior stage of growth biases the subsequent ones, what Deacon frames as 'compound interest.'

In contrast to a snow crystal’s growth, in which all units added are similar, in autocatalytic reactions different types of molecules interact with each other. In a chemical soup, sometimes one molecule can catalyze another and so on until a closed loop forms. As long as sufficient energy and raw material are available, such an autocatalytic set can strongly influence how the soup is constituted. The potential interaction of the different specific molecules with each other as well as the potential relational properties of the whole have a strong influence on the organization that develops. Cellular metabolism is constituted around many autocatalytic cycles. Together, they "constitute a system dynamics that is 'autopoietic' (literally, 'self-making').”

In each of these examples of second-order emergent phenomena, "we find a tangled hierarchy of causality, where micro-configurational particularities can be amplified to determine macro-configurational regularities and where these in turn further constrain and/or amplify subsequent micro-configurational regularities. … As material and energy flows in, through and out again, form also re-circulates and becomes amplified. In one sense this form is nothing more than a set of restrictions upon and biases towards possible future material and energetic events; in another sense, it is what defines and bounds the higher-order unity that we identify as the system."

In third order emergent systems, in addition to the above, some sort of informational memory is present. "...[N]ot only is there an amplification of the global influences on parts, but also a redundant 'sampling' of these influences which reintroduces them into different realizations of the system over time.” Memory, in the form of genetic material, for example, allows third order emergent systems to enclose morphodynamic systems in another causal loop. This memory or historical encoding means that new forms can now be maintained across chasms of time, space, and energy. Such systems are inherently developmental and/or evolutionary. "…[N]atural selection can be seen as a random or stochastic 'exploration' of variant morphodynamic relationships of reciprocity with respect to environmental regularities."

"...[B]ecause there is a remembered trace of each prior 'self' state contributing to the dynamics of future states, such systems develop not merely with respect to the immediate prior state of the whole, but also with respect to their own remembered past states. This contributes to the characteristic differentiation and divergence from, and the convergence back towards, some 'reference' state, which organisms standardly exhibit."

With third order emergence, purpose emerges. Third order emergent systems and the atoms that compose them "do something for something." Their purpose is forged by their emergent history. The hemoglobin molecule, for example, cannot be completely described by its physics, chemistry or even its biology. Its "... existence must be seen against a backdrop of vastly more numerous molecular forms that were eliminated via natural selection, leaving hemoglobin as the one representative of the set. …Hemoglobin occupies the space of possibilities that was left". Deacon suggests that life is synonymous with third order emergent phenomenon. “It's embedded circular architecture of circular architectures definitely marks the boundary of a unit of causal self-reference that is extended in both space and time.”

This purpose at the center of third order emergence—movement towards some target state by competitive reproductive success—justifies calling these “teleodynamic systems.” Yet this purpose is also a specific absence, just as the void that forms the vessel in the Taoist verse earlier. It echoes and builds on the specific absence in the other two kinds of emergence as well. Each develops around what Deacon calls the least-discordant remainder. Future events are shaped less by determinism than by "what was not cancelled or eliminated.” This leads to an apparent time reversal in the sense that what is not there, the "pull of yet unrealized possibility," becomes efficacious. This pull of unrealized possibility comes to determine "function in biology and purposeful action in psychology.” It is also “the essence of representation, or intentionality: something whose existence is conditional upon something that is not. It is this feature of mental phenomena that has most mystified scholars for millennia: their 'aboutness.’"

Each of the three types of emergence represents a causal topology that is circular or closed. Thus “... while it is technically correct to say that life and mind supervene on chemical processes, it is misleading to say that they are 'merely' or 'nothing but' chemical processes… This collapses the complex levels of emergent relationships that stand in between.”

These causal topologies also help redefine three of Aristotle's causes and interconnect them. Teleodynamic emergence roughly corresponds to final causality. It encircles morphodynamics emergence, which in some sense corresponds to formal causality, which in turn encircles thermodynamic or efficient causality.

At the pinnacle of these causalities rests human consciousness and the subjective experience of self. Deacon writes, “A symbolizing mind has perhaps the widest possible locus of causal influence of anything on earth. …Human consciousness—with its features of autonomous causal locus, self-origination, and implicit 'aboutness’—epitomizes the logic of emergence in its very form. Like something coming out of nothing, the subjective self is, in effect, a constitutive absence for the sake of which new constitutive absence is being incessantly evolved. In this sense, there is some legitimacy to the eliminativist claim that there is no 'thing' that it is. Indeed this must be so. The locus of self is, effectively, a negative mode of existence that can act as an unmoved mover of sorts, a non-thing that nonetheless is the locus of a form of inertia—a resistance to change—with respect to which other physical processes can be recruited and organize."

Taking Science on Faith - by Paul Davies

Paul Davis feels that both science and religion “fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.” Neither externally imposed (God-given) laws, nor the multiple universe theory, another way to account for the existence of a life in our universe, can satisfactorily account for the origin of life (see Religion vs Science: Bridging the Gap). The “multiverse” theory proposes that many universes with different sets of laws exist and our universe just happens to have a set compatible with life. Davis instead regards “the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system.” This view is consistent with a number of other articles we have posted. (See some of the entries under the Co-dependent Arising and Cosmology labels in the index).

Paul Davies is the director of Beyond, a research center at Arizona State University, and the author of “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life.” This article was published as an Op-Ed in the New York Times in November 2007.

Study of Clouds by Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich
Этюд Oблаков
reproduced with permission from the Nicholas Roerich Museum of New York City

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

Nature and Wonder: A Reconnaissance of Heaven- by Carl Sagan

This post is from the first chapter of Carl Sagan’s book, THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE SEARCH FOR GOD, edited by Ann Druyan. It helps place our home, the Earth, in the Cosmos. These excerpted passages---especially without the pictures---can only hint at the power of the chapter. In contrast to the previous entry that evoked a moment of cosmic consciousness from the inside, subjective viewpoint, this entry evokes the experience of cosmic consciousness from the outside, objective viewpoint. Reprinted with permission.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin for “binding together,” to connect that which has been sundered apart. It’s a very interesting concept. And in this sense of seeking the deepest interrelationships among things that superficially appear to be sundered, the objectives of religion and science, I believe, are identical or very nearly so. But the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields and the methods of approach.

By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe that it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and literature. Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of warship. And Albert Einstein said, “I maintain that the cosmic religion feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” So if both Carlyle in Einstein could agree on something, it has a modest possibility of even being right. (...)

There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. It’s about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one. (...)

...[W]here would the sun be? Would it be in the center of the galaxy, where things are clearly important, or at least well lit? The answer is no. We would be somewhere out in the galactic boondocks, the extreme suburbs, where the action isn't. We are situated in a very unremarkable, unprepossessing location in this great Milky Way Galaxy. But of course, it is not the only galaxy. Very many galaxies, a very large number of galaxies....

(In fact, there are more galaxies in the universe than stars with in the Milky Way Galaxy.) (...) The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how many stars that means …[i]t's something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.... Edward Young, in the 18th century, said, "An undevout astronomer is mad," from which I suppose it is essential that we all declare our devotion at risk of being adjudged mad. But devotion to what?

All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe... There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the Cosmos if there is a great deal of life. For example, we talked about stars in the late stages of their evolution. We've talked about supernova explosions. There are much vaster explosions. There are explosions at the center of galaxies from what are called quasars. There are other explosions, maybe small quasars. In fact, the Milky Way galaxy itself has had a set of explosions from its center, some thirty thousand light-years away. And if, as I will speculate later, life and perhaps even intelligence is a cosmic commonplace, then it must follow that there is massive destruction of whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe.

... In fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a God of the galaxy, much less of a universe... I don't propose that is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it's important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face to face with an awesome Cosmos that is simply different from the Cosmos of our pious ancestors.

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we admiring. If we see that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe and all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand if such a traditional God does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

Religion vs Science: Bridging the Gap - by Lois Isenman

The gym is not a place I associate with insight into the important spiritual or intellectual issues of our day. Nor for that matter is Time Magazine. I had just finished my workout on the elliptical machine and was on my way to the weight room when I glanced at the magazine table in the hall and in the corner of my eye caught the cover of Time. The cover article “God vs. Science” got my attention. Yet it was as much the spaciousness of the cover design that held my interest. In contrast to Time’s usual dark and busy cover, it was a large white field mostly empty except for an uncurled DNA double helix sauntering down its length to one side. The DNA bases turned into rosary beads and the "molecule" ended up holding a cross--- but I didn't see that until later. I grabbed the magazine and brought it with me to the weight room.

The body of the article turned out to be a debate between an evolutionary biologist and a Christian geneticist. Richard Dawkins , a well-known evolutionary biologist is virulently anti-religion: his recent book is called The God Delusion. The geneticist, Francis Collins, led the effort to decode the genome: his recent book is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. A while back I heard Dawkins debate a leading intelligent design proponent on NPR. I am very attached to the idea of evolution---to its power and elegance: my sympathies were certainly not with the fundamentalist. However I felt there was something lacking in the case that Dawkins made. Evolution and a sense of a deeper purpose or meaning to existence than that of the material world are not necessarily opposed to each other. I have trouble with the concept of God, but I do believe in the reality of something beyond the material world.

Francis Collins, the geneticist argued--- as do many scientists of faith--- that the fact that the six universal or cosmological constants work out to be just what they have to be to support life indicate that the universe was the handiwork of God. Most scientists agree that if even one constant had been a little off in one direction after the Big Bang--- for example if the gravitational constant had been off by one part in 100 million million --- the expansion of the universe would not have occurred in a way that would have eventually supported life. This is called the anthropic principle.

Dawkins countered in part that this assumes that the cosmological constants are fluid rather than fixed.

"People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill."

Certainly it is difficult to imagine the divine knob twiddling. Yet much more interesting to me is the other tact he and others use to argue against the difficult to account for coincidence implied by the universal constants working out just right to support life. If there were not just one, but a very large number of universes with different cosmological constants, then finding one where everything worked out right would not be so wondrous and would not necessitate an underlying intelligence.

"The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning."

In response Collins invokes Occam’s razor, saying that he finds the idea of a designer a simpler hypothesis than postulating a large number of alternative universes.

"This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination."

This helps illustrate what is so often true. One person’s Occam's razor, or simpler explanation, is another person's Mount Everest--- or nearly impossible impasse. I have to say that I am with Collins on this one (though I would posit an intelligent force rather than a designer-- which is too” knob twiddling” for me). An intelligent force seems to be simpler to me than an almost infinite number of universes. Yet I'm not sure which I would think the simpler hypothesis if I didn't have sporadic experiences that support the existence of a deeper and more sophisticated force working in us and through us. My personal concept of spirituality is pretty much grounded in those brief moments in which I get hints of this larger consciousness in the cosmos.

Source: http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1034552630026140686cDYFEY

Notice I said nearly impossible impasse above when remarking that one person's Occam's razor is another person's Mount Everest. Alas Dawkins, a scientist with a large theoretical reach---in spite of his strong antireligious bias --- does seem able to make an assent. He says,

"I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine…My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up…. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."

Thus Dawkins is not necessarily arguing against mystery, but just for greater mystery that can be contained in God as a historical concept. A wise not so old man I met recently, when I told him about this debate, gave me a new sense of why Jews are not supposed to say the word God. Perhaps Annie Dillard , whose books have a strong spiritual thread (see Oct 26), captures this best---for our unholy and minimalist age--- when she writes, “I don't know beans about God.”

This piece first appeared in Intuition in Depth