I was tempted to title this post, "Looking for God in all the wrong places," but it seems a bit too cheeky, don't you think? Alan Lightman has been a prominent physicist, and is that rare breed, a scientist who is also a qualified professor of the Humanities. It may in part stem from an experience he had in his younger years, as related in Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine: lying back in a small boat near his favorite island, looking into the starry sky, he had a transcendent experience. You can't un-experience such an experience.
Make no mistake, Dr. Lightman is a committed scientist. He is thus most comfortable with a Materialist philosophy, which posits that the physical world is all there is. As one of many paraphrases puts it, "If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist." And we must admit that scientific materialism has gotten us pretty far. But, while he is "most comfortable" in Materialism, he isn't entirely comfortable with it or within it. There is that pesky experience—and there have been others—that is just as real to him as the shoes on his feet.
Science and Religion represent the stereotypes of Relativism versus Absolutism. Although there are certain absolutes in the scientific realm, and some relatives in the religious or spiritual realm, the dichotomy is pretty clear for most instances. As a committed Materialist who nonetheless finds in himself a yearning for something Absolute, Dr. Lightman dwells in a boundary land.
It is sometimes said that scientific evidence must include reproducibility. If I mix chemicals A and B and chemical C is always produced, I can try to publish the results of my experiments. But the journals (major ones, at least) will send the article to other scientists to review, to pass judgment, whether it is worth publishing. If the experiment can be replicated, of course, at least one reviewer is likely to do just that, to make certain that chemical C does indeed result, and not chemical D or E…or nothing at all. Of course, all the experiments that are that easy have been done and published long ago, so now a reviewer will instead determine if the experiment is at least repeatable in principle. Only in the most controversial cases will someone attempt to replicate the experiment.
I like to pose the following to my scientific friends:
Non-repeatable phenomena: Many people engage in a certain activity that is known to usually evoke certain emotional responses in other people. This activity can be carried out by one person alone, or several persons carrying it out together. A large number of standard "recipes" exist (though we are not talking about cooking here). Frequently, following a specific recipe yields a known result. But not always. Some people try, but get a different result, sometimes even a response opposite to that expected. The outcome is not at all consistent!Can you think what this activity may be?
Singing. And before you think, "Oh, some people just don't have a good voice," I am sure you know of people with a fine, melodious voice who nonetheless cannot convey the expected emotional impact of a specific song. Even: not all expert, operatic tenors can sing "Nessun Dorma" and get the same response that Luciano Pavarotti could. And I suspect that nobody with a "good" voice can effectively convey the power of a Bob Dylan song.
But what about simple systems? One of the simplest systems of all is a single electron moving through a hole and hitting a detector that can tell you where it hit (a sensitive CCD can do that). It may not be simple to set up, but once operating, suppose that roughly one electron per second is released to zoom through that hole. You are in a room with many others, and a screen is set up to record the results of each electron's impact on the CCD. You are given the chance to place a bet on where the next electron will hit. Do you place a bet?
If you know the initial speed and trajectory of the electron, and the diameter of the hole, you can calculate with absolute certainty, using the law of diffraction, what is the probability that it will fall on any particular segment of the CCD. But nobody can predict on which segment the next electron will land. So here in one experiment you have an Absolute matter and a Relative matter.
The book's chapters do not dwell on electrons, but are instead titled things like "Hummingbird", "Truth", "Transcendence", "Monk" and "Death". The second chapter is titled, "Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World," and introduces the rest. I kept hoping to read that this seeker after faith had found faith in God. At least in this book, he has not done so. An absolute God is apparently a step too far for him, an Absolute just too, well, absolute. But when you have experienced transcendence, you can never forget that there are things our relativistic science can never account for, and perhaps, the things that it can account for are in the minority.
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