God and Wild Strawberries

Ten days ago, I received an email from Brian Miller commenting on a recent post of mine, God Said; We Say. The point of the email was the clear and distinct end: “I have heard of many religious people becoming atheists, but it is unusual to find people going in the opposite direction. I would be very grateful if you explained to me your idea of God. I assure you I will pay very close attention to it, and I’m ready to be converted.”

Brian is a retired dermatologist with an excellent education, undergraduate studies at Yale and medical training at Harvard. He attended a continuing education seminar I led on Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. A good seminar participant, Brian usually sat next to me and seemed to be well-read in the major wisdom traditions, although he appeared indifferent to The Snow Leopard, and at times in class, he had the aloof, superior demeanor of an M.D.

On and off, Brian has sent me various emails with always the same motif: “There is no direct or indirect evidence of God or gods; it is a matter of blind faith. I find it impossible to have faith or belief in anything for which there is no direct or indirect evidence.” So, when Brian told me he was ready to be converted to my idea of God, I truthfully did not know what to make of his request. I did not know if he was a genuine seeker or an arrogant debunker. In my experience, we have become a passionless society; seekers and debunkers alike rest contentedly with no anguish, no desperation, with nothing at state.

Leo Tolstoy is a prime example of a passionate seeker. When he turned fifty, he had published War and Peace and Anna Karenina, owned a 16,500-acre estate, and was happily married with six loving children. Unlike most of us, Tolstoy had fulfilled his every desire, and he had nothing left to wish for.

One morning he woke up and asked, “What’s it all about, Leo? Where does it all lead?” He no longer could close his eyes to avoid seeing that only suffering and death, complete annihilation, awaited him. He encountered what he thought was the fundamental truth of human existence — life is meaningless. To avoid hanging himself or firing a bullet into his brain, he hid the cord in his dressing room and refused to hunt. Tolstoy became a true seeker and eventually found God.[1]

 The new evangelical atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett exhibit the zeal of true believers.[2] Christopher Hitchens, a debunker of pretty much everything and everyone, including God, “the utter negation of human freedom. Who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died?” Hitchens fervently concludes that God does not exist.[3]

I found Brian’s passionless request puzzling, for I come from a long line of Romanian gypsies; we former peasants, drink too much, eat too much, laugh too much, sing too much, and dance too much — we do everything to excess, so to be a lukewarm seeker is baffling to me.

I was tempted to write back to Brian and bluntly say I don’t give a rat’s ass about what you believe, what you clutch dear to your heart, what makes you happy is fine with me. I have no desire to convert you to Orthodox Christianity, Marxism, or to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, to any religious, political, or scientific doctrine.

But I always distrust my initial reactions, which I discovered long ago have more to do with me than the other person. Brian could be just cold and shy but really suffering, and I, as a fellow human being, would then have an obligation to help him the best I could, even though I am a ham-and-egger reared in Union Lake, Michigan, not a center of spirituality. I provisionally assumed that Brian genuinely desired to be converted to an idea of God. I would have sent him to a friend of mine, Father James, a Benedictine priest, a proselytizer, and champion of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, if it were not for the Covid-19 Pandemic. Instead, I sent him my scientific update of what I thought was Aquinas’ best argument for the existence of God.

The Argument from Design

In both manmade and natural objects, design is apparent. Matter by itself cannot produce microchips, digital cameras, or Boeing 747s; human minds are needed. Analogously, matter on its own cannot bring into being petunias or Siberian tigers; a mind is needed, and the only candidate is a Divine Mind.

Natural selection, supposedly, crushed the argument from design. Darwin showed unequivocally that a small series of improbable, small blind steps could result in apparent design without the guidance of a designer.

 The most recent argument for design comes from physics, not biology. Abundant evidence from the physical sciences reveals that our universe is bio-friendly. For instance, if the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms were slightly stronger, the diproton would exist, making ordinary hydrogen catastrophically explosive. Hydrogen would be rare, and stars like the Sun that live a long time by burning hydrogen could not exist. If the strong force were half its present strength, hydrogen would not burn at all, and there would be no heavy elements. If, as seems likely, life requires a star like the Sun, supplying energy at a constant rate for billions of years, then for life to be possible, the strength of the strong force must be within a narrow range. If the strong force were slightly stronger, no hydrogen; if less than half its present strength, no heavy elements. Either way, life is impossible.

The same pattern recurs with many other fundamental constants of nature. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle postulated, in 1954, a nuclear resonance that makes possible the synthesis of carbon nuclei in star. Shortly thereafter experiment confirmed that two helium nuclei join to form the un­stable nucleus of beryllium 8, which sometimes before fissioning absorbs another helium nucleus, forming carbon 12 in an excited state. If the energy of this excited state of carbon 12 were slightly higher, almost all the beryllium 8 nuclei would fission into helium nuclei before carbon could be formed, and nuclei heavier than boron would not exist. The universe, then, would consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — and life would be impossible.

Twenty-eight years later, Hoyle concluded that the precise details of nuclear physics that resulted in a bio-friendly universe were a “put-up job.” Abandoning his earlier and vehement anti-God stance, he said, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”^[4]

The list of strangely fortunate physical properties that make life possible goes on and on. Without the “put-up job” in atomic physics, water would not exist as a liquid, chains of carbon atoms would not form complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms would not form breakable bridges between molecules.

The most striking “put-up job” is the fine-tuning of the expansion of the universe. If the universe were expanding too slowly, it would re-collapse into oblivion. If the universe were expanding too fast, matter would become isolated and galaxies would not form. In actuality, the expansion of the universe is exquisitely tuned to ensure the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets.

The evidence that the universe is uniquely suited for life is undeniable; no physicist doubts this. The strong anthropic principle states that the universe must have those properties that allow intelligent life to appear at some stage in its history. After the Big Bang, the universe appears to be aiming at life and intelligent observers. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler asks, “What possible sense it could make to speak of ‘the universe’ unless there was someone around to be aware of it?”^[5]

A universe aiming at the production of intelligent observers implies a mind directing it; for matter on its own cannot aim at anything. A mind that directs the whole universe, all the laws of nature, and all the properties of matter to a goal is called God by theologians.

Brian Reveals His Faith

Brian’s response to me relied heavily upon the PBS program The Fabric of the Universe, where he learned that physicists hate the anthropic principle because of the obvious implication that God exists. The latest way to accept the evidence that the universe is uniquely suited for life and deny the existence of God is to appeal to a multiverse, an appeal that can be rooted in either cosmology or particle physics. Some cosmologists adhere to the theory of eternal inflation, where our Big Bang is just one of an infinite number that has taken place in an infinite universe. String theorists, on the other hand, claim our universe is one of billions and billions of universes — 10⁵⁰⁰ to be more or less exact.^[6] The number 10⁵⁰⁰ is mind-bogglingly large. The number of grains of sand that could be densely packed into the visible universe is infinitesimal compare to 10⁵⁰⁰.

In the 10⁵⁰⁰ universes of string theory or the infinite number of universes of eternal inflation, properties of matter are assumed to occur by chance so that a universe like ours “fine-tuned” for life is bound to appear. In this way, chance replaces God.

What Brian did not learn by viewing The Fabric of the Universe is that the underpinnings of the multiverse — eternal inflation or string theory — lack experimental verification.

Physicist Paul Steinhardt co-authored seminal papers on inflationary cosmology, yet later argued that if eternal inflation were true, then “everything that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.”[7]

Also the implications of an infinite number of Big Bangs in a multiverse governed by deterministic laws borders on the absurd. In such a multiverse, every finite system with a finite number of states occurs an infinite number of times. Thus, innumerable planets like Earth occur. On countless Earths, the Nazis lost World War II, and on the same number of planets, they won.

In a 1987 interview, guru physicist Richard Feynman pointed to a fundamental problem with the work of string theorists: “I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation — a fix up to say ‘Well, it still might be true.’”[8] For more than twenty-five years after Feynman’s criticisms, at least 3,500 high-energy theorists have struggled with string theory, creating elegant mathematics and a better understanding of quantum field theory, but not one of these theorists have come up with an experimental test of string theory. No wonder Sheldon Glashow, one of the principal architects of the standard model of particle physics, asks ironically, “Are string thoughts more appropriate to departments of mathematics, or even to schools of divinity, than to physics departments?”[9]

I discovered Brian’s faith from several more exchanges of emails with him. The underlying faith that leads scientists and moderns like Brian to reject any argument for the existence of God was made explicit by biologist Richard Lewontin: “We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes . . . Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”^[10]

Materialism: An Intellectual Pathology of Modernity

A glance at ancient India reveals our cultural bias about mind and matter. The ancient Hindu sages taught that mind was eternal, much like diamond, and matter fleeting like smoke. Brian and almost all modern Westerners believe matter is eternal and liken it to diamond and hold that mind is wispy and ephemeral, much like smoke.

During the Enlightenment, materialism seized the imagination of philosophers, scientists, and the man on the street, for no one in the Western World failed to see that scientists commanded nature. Even the most poorly educated peasant understood that the state of scientific knowledge was greatly advancing, while the most sophisticated intellectual knew that philosophy remained a domain of “contentious and barking disputation,”^[11] where nothing is ever settled. Smallpox vaccine, the steam train, and the electrical telegraph demonstrated that science was the true path to knowledge, and that was bad news for theologians, philosophers, and poets, for they could not command nature. Their prestige began a steady, irreversible decline. Today, no one speaks of poetic knowledge, philosophical insights into nature and human affairs, or killer arguments for the existence of God.

In Modernity, we are schooled to believe that every object, as well as every act in the universe, is matter, an aspect of matter, or produced by matter — that is, we are trained to be materialists. In graduate school, I scoffed at my two fellow students who regularly attended church. At that time, for me, the brain was the mind and God an illusion; however, a moment’s reflection shows that materialism is the dumbest philosophy to come down the pike and only cultural blindness keeps it alive.

A Killer Argument That Disproves Materialism

Brain function alone cannot explain the most obvious human experience — we perceive. Textbooks typically gloss over the profound difference between sense perception and its necessary physical components. With regard to vision, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the physical structure of DNA and an atheist, confesses, “We really have no clear idea how we see anything. This fact is usually concealed from the students who take such courses [as the psychology, physiology, and cell biology of vision].”^[12]

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger argues that materialism is incapable of explaining how we see. The killer argument: “If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all.”^[13]

Although Schrödinger employs technical language, his insights into the nature of perception are based on straightforward observations. Suppose sunlight is reflected from a red apple into the eye of a landscape painter. The sunlight passes through the lens of the eye and strikes the retina, a sheet of closely­ packed receptors — 4.5 million cones and 90 million rods. Activated by the incoming sunlight, chemical changes occur in the rods and cones, which are then translated into electrical impulses that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. Further electrical and chemical changes take place in the brain. In terms of the physiology of seeing, this description is complete; however, the sensation red has not appeared in this materialistic account of perception. The landscape painter experiences the red of the apple, not the myriad chemical and electrical changes that are necessary for seeing.

What is true for seeing is true of the other senses: Physical-chemical changes in the brain are insufficient to explain any sensory perception; the sensible qualities a person perceives never appear in the brain. The brain itself is shrouded in complete silence, even while a person hears the deafening roar of a jet aircraft engine. Likewise, the brain, encased in the skull, is covered with darkness even while a person perceives the brilliance of the sun’s glare. Our brains do not become colder when we touch snow or harder when we touch iron. The brain tissue itself takes on none of the sourness of a tasted lemon or the acrid odor of the skunk’s spray that we smell.

Mechanical, chemical, and electrical changes themselves are not thoughts, desires, and emotions. The toolbox of physical science is limited to air pressure, chemical changes, electrical impulses in nerves, brain cell activity, and other properties of matter. Materialism cannot explain hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The reason is obvious: the interior life of a person is nonmaterial — perceptions, emotions, and thoughts cannot be touched, smelled, tasted, heard, or seen.

Despite theoretical claims to the contrary, neuroscience does not account for a person’s interior life in terms of matter alone. No researcher begins with neurons, neurotransmitters, and action potentials and then explains how sensations and emotions arise from these basic elements. Furthermore, the interior life of a person is not open to observation. Instead, neuroscientists in practice take perceiving, feeling, thinking, and willing as primary and then attempt to correlate brain activity with what the human subject reports. The chemical and electrical activity in the brain is understood in terms of the interior life of the human being. In practice, neuroscience affirms that the mind is primary, not matter.[14]

Brian’s response to the killer argument that disproves materialism surprised me. He accepted the killer argument — “how such mere objects as a brain and its neurons can give rise to the eerily different phenomenon of subjective experience seems utterly incomprehensible” — yet, kept the faith — “our inability to see how certain material structures produce subjective experience is that our evolved, finite brains cannot fathom the answer to every question that we can ask.” I concluded, although Brian did not, that his belief that “the universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter” is an irrational ideology unshakeable by any argument or by any direct evidence.

Brian and I reached the point where I had to forget my Romanian upbringing that instilled in me excessive politeness.  

Ideas and Experience

I told Brian that to ask for my idea of God — as if I had an idea of God — is typical of a modern; after Descartes and Luther, Western philosophy and theology became obsessed with finding the right ideas. I gave a directive to Brian: “If you want an idea of God, go back and reread Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy; no one now finds any of that verbiage convincing, and rightly so.”

I then pointed out that the Eastern Church and medieval theology share a deep insight about God. According to the Church Fathers, any idea about the essence of God is deficient, an understanding succinctly stated by St. Peter of Damascus: God “is always beyond goodness, righteous, all-wise, all-powerful, unconquerable, dispassionate, uncircumscribed, infinite, unsearchable, incomprehensible, unending, eternal, uncreated, invariable, unchanging, true, incomposite, invisible, untouchable, ungraspable, perfect, beyond being, inexpressible, inexplicable, full of mercy, full of compassion and sympathy, all-ruling, all-seeing.”[15]

In his masterpiece, Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas, gave what were once convincing arguments for a Creator, the immortality of the soul, and eternal salvation. However, Thomas Aquinas, the most rational and clearest of theologians, shortly before his death, had a mystical experience when celebrating the Mass; as a result, he left the Summa Theologica unfinished. When urged by Reginald of Peperino to explain the radical change in his religious perspective, Thomas simply said, “Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison to what I have seen and now what has been revealed to me.”[16]

Father Raymond Braga, a Romanian Orthodox Priest, speaks of his road to God following both the Summa Theologica and the Philokalia, a collection of texts written by spiritual masters of the mystical Hesychast tradition. Interred in a Communist prison for eleven years, he confesses that before his solitary confinement, “I was a priest, I was a monk, and I’m ashamed to say that God, my God, was the God of the Book. But God is alive, is experience, is personal experience.”^[17] Father Braga implicitly tells us that merely reciting the Creed in church, reading the Scriptures, and performing the correct rituals, many of which are cultural, does not make the interior life flourish or draw a believer closer to God.

In their own way, Thomas Aquinas and Father Braga discovered why the three great teachers of humankind, the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus, did not write a single word. The great teachers showed us how to live, how to walk the path to the transcendent. Their disciples did not see that the danger inherent in writing down oral teaching is that the word can be easily mistaken for the object.

To ask the question, “What is your concept of God?” is as absurd as to seek the correct answer to the question, “What does a wild strawberry taste like?” My first taste of a wild strawberry was an explosion of sweetness with floral notes of rose and violet, like nothing I had experienced before, but Brian, my answer leaves you clueless, so let’s consult the Masters to learn the taste of a wild strawberry. Aristotle quoted Heraclitus, “The wild strawberry is a symbol of love;” Calvin condemned the wild strawberry as a powerful aphrodisiac; Nietzsche praised “wild strawberries, women, and song;” Heidegger in his walks through the forest surrounding his cabin crushed wild strawberries beneath the heels of his leather boots; Hegel states bluntly, for once, that “the Idea of the Wild Strawberry is yet to arrive.”

Similarly, in the world of ideas, God is the subject of endless debate and commentary that often degenerates into a labyrinth of rhetoric, employing historical references, cultural dogmas, and subjective opinions. Many believers think that engaging in pointless theological speculations leads to the correct ideas about God and use such quarrels and controversies to avoid walking in the footsteps of Jesus. No one dares to say that ideas of God are at best a shadow of reality, at worst nonsense.

Just as speech cannot give anyone the experience of the taste of a wild strawberry, so too speech cannot capture the essence of God. Before he experienced the presence of God, Aquinas had concluded that God is beyond our comprehension: “It is because human intelligence is not equal to the divine essence that this same divine essence surpasses our intelligence and is unknown to us: wherefore man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows Him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of Him.”^[18] The terms good, wise, and just do not signify the essence of God “perfectly as it exists in itself, but as it is conceived by us.”^[19] As an example, Aquinas says wisdom can be applied to God in three ways: 1) God is wise, since in Him there is a likeness to wisdom; 2) God is not wise, since the wisdom in Him we cannot understand and name; and 3) We ought to say God is supra-wise, since He transcends the wisdom we indicate and name.^[20] In the hostile deputations in the world of ideas, any imperfect idea of God is easily undermined.

Brian replied with two sentences. “I know how to experience the taste of a wild strawberry. How do I experience God?” To answer that question, I had to take the gloves off. We love the truth that exposes the weaknesses of our brothers and sisters but hate the truth that reveals us.

Through meditation, or what the Patristic Fathers called contemplation, we can witness our thoughts, memories, and storytelling, and thus know that we are not what we witness. Through more advanced contemplation, a few zealous practitioners may experience Divine Light, the presence of God, but not the essence of God.

At the core of our being is the unnamable, the “empty mind” of Zen Buddhism, the “pure consciousness” of Hinduism, and the “spirit” of Christianity; however, all words ultimately fail to capture the divine element within us. We, the unenlightened, believe that the self given to us by culture is permanent and fail to see that this self is an illusion, destined to vanish with the death of the body. Because we take our culturally-given self for our true self, we fail to experience who we truly are. Our true self is always present, completely perfected with no need for development from us; we must merely step aside. Every spiritual master calls for the death of the culturally-given self and a spiritual rebirth beyond egoistic desires, beyond religious practices, beyond any given culture, beyond the dictates of society, into the law of love, into compassion for every living being.

Brian Miller is an artifact that seeks wealth, fame, and power to enhance itself; that desires the adulation of others; that uses its siblings, wife, and others to satisfy its desires; that refuses to see that its memories and personal history, mostly fictions and embellishments, do not survive death. The death of the self is scary and painful. For most of us, only personal disaster forces us out of the safe zone of illusion that we cling to.

The initial approach to God is through the dark night of the soul. When everything is stripped away from you, when everything you take yourself to be is experienced as an illusion, nothing seems permanent, nothing meaningful. On the other side of black nothingness is Divine Light.

Brian did not reply.

The main image is courtesy of Burst.

Endnotes

[1] Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude.

[2] See Richard Dawkins, The God Illusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (New York: Norton, 2004), and Daniel Dennett Breaking the Spell (New York, Viking, 2006).

[3] Christopher Hitchens, “Introduction,” The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, ed. Christopher Hitchens (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007), p. xxii.

[4] Fred Hoyle, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.

[5] John A. Wheeler, “Genesis and Observership,” in Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences, ed. Robert E. Butts and Jaakko Hintikka (Dor­drecht, Holland: Reidel, 1977), p. 18.

[6] See Leonard Susskind, Interview, Amanda Gefter, “Is string theory in trouble?”, New Scientist (17 December 2005). Also, see Steven Weinberg, Living in the Multiverse. 

[7] Paul Steinhardt, “Big Bang blunder bursts the multiverse bubble,” Nature 510 (5 June 2014): 9.

[8] Richard Feynman, Interview, in P. C. Davies and Julian Brown, eds. Superstrings: A Theory of Everything (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 194.

[9] Sheldon Glashow, with Ben Bova, Interactions: A Journey through the Mind of a Particle Physicist (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1988), p. 25.

[10] Richard C. Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books (January 1997): 37. Italics added.

[11] Francis Bacon, The New Organon: Or the True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960 [1620]), p. 18.

[12] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, (New York: Scrib­ner’s, 1994), p. 3.

[13] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 153.

[14] For a detailed discussion of the nonmateriality of our interior life, see George Stanciu, Materialism: The False God of Modern Science.

  Here is a short amusing example of why our interior life does not result from brain function alone. During the day, adenosine builds up in the brain to register the amount of time elapsed since a person awoke. When adenosine concentration peaks, a person feels the irresistible urge to sleep. The concentration of adenosine and the feeling of sleepiness are incommensurable. No matter how much a neuroscientist probes the brain with scans and chemical assays, she will never find sleepiness.

[15] St. Peter of Damascus, Twenty-Four Discourses in The Philokalia, Vol. III, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 255. Italics added.

[16]Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Bernhard Lang, Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 323.

[17] Raymond Braga, Interview, John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, produced and directed by Helen Whitney, PBS Video. Transcript.

[18] Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei, Q. VII: Article V.

[19] Ibid.

[20] See Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei, Q. VII: Article V