The way to understand something about the world was to steer a course between a belief in the universal power of reason and an unbending skepticism about our ability to know anything at all.
Charles King
Perhaps the best way to understand why Christians and atheists see and
interpret “miracles” differently is by understanding the difference between how
two physicists looked at reality itself and saw two very different things.
Those two physicists were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and while one studied classical physics and
the motion of planets, the other studied the motion of subatomic particles, otherwise known as quantum mechanics.
Looking through the lens of classical physics, Einstein saw how planets operated in the universe in an orderly manner, obeying definite deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics. For the Christian, those laws were written and set in motion by the hand of God. Bohr, on the other hand, saw something different. He saw the world through the prism of quantum physics, where reality itself was indefinite, animated by the unruly hand of a nature that, like the Christian God murdering the whole world with a flood, seemed free to ignore the laws of nature whenever it wanted. As a result of the indeterminate nature of quantum physics, Bohr famously said “those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
So who was right: Einstein or Bohr? The answer to that question was foreshadowed in the evolution of how we see our solar system today, and how it was so different from how we saw it a few hundred years ago.
How the Evolution of Classical Physics Began to Change Our View of Miracles
Claudius Ptolemy was a 2nd century Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer. He was famous for his controversial geocentric theory of the universe, in which he placed the Earth at the center of his model. His view would form the basis of our understanding of the motions of stars and planets for more than a thousand years.
Using the data he had, Ptolemy also thought that the universe was a set of
nested spheres surrounding the Earth. He believed that the Moon was
orbiting on a sphere closest to the Earth, followed by Mercury, then
Venus and then the Sun. Copernicus later changed this to the heliocentric model, in which the sun sat at the center of the universe, but both he and Ptolemy's models of the planets still required perfect circular motion in the heavens. Like Ptolemy, Copernicus used circles on circles, called epicycles, to account for the movement of the planets. And this was because circles were believed to be perfect reflections of the divine.
Enter Tycho Brahe. In 1563, at age 16, he observed Jupiter overtaking Saturn as the planets moved past each other. Even with his simple observations he saw that existing tables for predicting this conjunction, which were based on epicycles, were off by a month, and even Copernicus's model was off by two days. Offering a new model for the cosmos that still depended on epicycles, Brahe realized the motions of the planets only made sense if all of the planets orbited the sun, and the sun and the moon orbited the Earth. But it was Brahe's assistant, Johannes Kepler, who showed that the problem was the reliance on those perfection reflections of the divine: circles.
Born in 1571, Kepler made major contributions to astronomy as his work mixed sophisticated mathematics and astronomy with mystical ideas about astrology. Kepler's quest to bring together geometry and physics led to a new shape of the planetary orbits. In Astronomie Nova (1609), Kepler presented extensive research on the orbit of Mars. Using Tycho Brahe's observational data, Kepler was able to fine tune the movements of the planets and demonstrate that the movement of Mars could be described as an ellipse.
The diagram from Astronomia Nova shows the difference between the perfect circle and the more pinched or squished inner ellipse. It was generally taken for granted that motions in the heavens would involve only perfect circles. However, through innovations in mathematics, Kepler was able to mathematically describe ellipses that closely fit the paths the planets moved through in the heavens. The ellipse enabled the removal of the epicycles and could account for the path of the planets in a single shape. His commitment to order pushed him to recalculate and rework his research until he figured out how to represent the orbits of the planets.
Alongside describing the elliptical nature of orbits, Astronomie Nova offered
initial arguments for a force of attraction that could organize and
hold this kind of system together. Kepler's work foreshadowed the
discovery of one of the fundamental forces of physics, the law of
gravity. As we will see, a commitment to seeing miracles as being the result of God rather than chance is very muck like seeing the Earth at the center of the universe, and the planets as all moving in perfect circles.
How a Fuller Understanding of Reality Advanced Our Understanding of Miracles
Even if there is a God that created the universe, that doesn't mean such a God had not created a universe that was capable of creating anomalies that those living within it would mistake for being something that required God's intercession to occur, rather than being simply the natural result of how the universe was designed to operate. Defending miracles as something that comes from God and not chance alone, as a result, is not about honestly considering what we can know about reality, but about how letting go of the interpretation that a miracle is a sign from God feels like letting go of much needed evidence, not that a God exists, but that the God we want to exist shows He cares about us by performing miracles. Since such a God could easily create a universe that produced anomalies that merely looked like miracles to imperfect homo sapiens, especially one's whose limitations are addled all the more by their stain of original sin, the choice to "believe" that such a God did not do so is obviously about how our interpretation of a "miracle" makes us feel more secure, and watched over, loved and protected, in an otherwise cold and careless universe.
Like Ptolemy seeing perfect circles and Kepler discovering ellipses instead, so Einstein saw perfect order where "God did not play with dice" while Bohr discovered the universe not only played with dice all the time, but even liked to ignore the rules of dice rolling in the process.
So who was right: Einstein or Bohr? The answer to that question came in 1972,
when John Clauser performed what are today known as the Bell experiments. Based
on the theoretical work of John Bell, those experiments finally demonstrated
that Einstein's deterministic view of reality was, in fact, only half of the
picture of the whole of reality. Those findings have not altered the way that
Christians think about miracles, of course, but they should have. But that's
the thing about "beliefs": their greatest virtue is also their greatest
vice. And both boiled down to a simple fact: beliefs never die.
Like Einstein's belief in Newtonian mechanics and Ptolemy's belief in epicycles, organized religion tends to
deify perfect symmetries operating according to perfect mechanical laws of order and tradition much in the same way it glorifies
a well ordered social system (but only ones in which it enjoys an elevated
position of power, which it then uses to defend the system as more good than
bad overall). It also demonizes ideas of chaos and change (especially if such
change demotes the role of the organized religion having a say in how to order
the society, as happened in Rome under the emperor Julian, which is why
Christians called him an "apostate").
Like quantum mechanics, however, nature itself tends to honor such laws more
in the breach than in the observance. One runs like a clock - hence the idea
that God is a watchmaker who "does not play with dice"- which
requires divine intervention to create something new, while the other operates
through a feedback loop that can perpetually evolve into something different;
with life and death acting as the revolving door between these two sides of
reality. The former is as limited in its habits as a well oiled machine, while
the latter has "free will" to produce anomalies, for only be doing so can it ever create something different, something new.
The discovery that Einstein's mathematical worldview was inaccurate turned out
to be both a blessing and a curse for the Christian concept of miracles. The
blessing was that it demonstrated how the material world was not as entirely
deterministic as so many Calvinists and atheists often argued it was. The
curse, at least with regard to miracles, was that it demonstrated how
"miracles" did not need to come from a deity operating outside of a
clock-like universe, but could bubble up from within the system itself, out of
the cauldron of chaos and uncertainty that underwrote reality on the quantum
level. Indeed, even our own ideas and beliefs about ourselves bubble up from our unconscious in a similar way.
In 1952, the English mathematician who cracked the German enigma code during
World War II, Alan Turing, demonstrated how this process occurs in an article,
"The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis." In it, Turing described how
patterns in nature, such as stripes and spirals, can arise naturally from a
homogeneous, uniform state. He demonstrated, in other words, how something new could arise out of something old. Using the language of mathematics, he demonstrated
how such patterns could form from pure chaos. There was no need for a God to
give the zebra its stripes and the leopard its spots, from this perspective,
because, like a virgin, mother-nature was capable of doing the job all on her own. And rather than building every level of
reality with the exacting precision of a German watchmaker, mother-nature
painted reality, from atoms to the Andromeda galaxy, with brush strokes that
could be as arbitrary as the hand of Jackson Pollock.
From Einstein's point of view, a miracle only happens when a supernatural agent
intervenes in the mechanically deterministic operations of the system it
created in order to produce a different outcome from that which the system
itself was designed to produce. This would be like Henry Ford altering the
assembly line in one of his auto factories so that it would assemble an
airplane instead of a car. In such a system, a child being spontaneously cured
of cancer would be no different than that same child suddenly becoming immune
to the force of gravity, since both would equally require as much supernatural
intervention to override the laws governing reality as Henry Ford altering the
production of one of his factories from building cars to building an airplane.
From Bohr's point of view, on the other hand, as Turing helped to
illustrate, a miracle is simply the result of a system that operates with
infinite possibilities producing an outcome that only seems "miraculous,"
not because it is the opposite of how the system actually works, but because,
like Einstein, we are only looking at half of the picture of reality and
assuming it is the whole thing. But despite beliefs to the contrary, reality
does not operate like an auto factory, nor is the human body simply an
automobile for the soul. Instead, as it turns out, mother-nature does indeed
like playing with dice.
In Chinese philosophy, the two perspectives of reality offered by Einstein and
Bohr, of classical and quantum physics, are reflected in the dualistic concept of
the yin and the yang. Yin and yang represent how seemingly opposite or contrary
forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the
natural world. Summing up the relationship between Einstein’s astrological yin
and Bohr’s quantum yang, Bohr explained how “the
paradoxical truth of reality itself is that everything that we regard as real is
made of things that cannot themselves be regarded as real” And for the atheist,
it is in the manger that sits in the intersection between these two points
where all miracles are born.
That the yin of an orderly universe emerges out of the chaotic yang of quantum mechanics
not only demonstrates that the order we rely on to give us some certainty of
reality is mostly a perceptual illusion, one which our senses cling to
anxiously to make sense of the world we live in, but it is also what leads the
atheist to conclude that anything a person defines as a "miracle" is
simply the result of our inability to understand exactly how one produces the
other, and why. Naturally, some say the answer to both of these questions is simply "God," while others are left to wonder "what does that even mean?"
Because we do not understand the specifics of how and why the order of our reality grows out of the soil of such quantum chaos, it is impossible to ever clearly understand the difference between "miracles" that are said to come from an "intentional agent" like a God, who is said to exist outside of the system, and which miracles come from out of the chaos that underwrites the fabric of reality itself, which we then feel must come from an intentional agent like a God, even if didn't.
What it does do, however, is demonstrate that the chaos Christians attribute to their devil, and the order which they attribute to their God, are actually two sides of the same reality; a reality which reveals "miracles" and "anomalies" to be simply subjective qualifications that reflect only our own culturally inclined biases for approving of one, and our indifference or disapproval of other. In other words, they are qualifications that are determined not by how things are, but by how we are, and how we think, and what we “believe” to be true, even if it ain't.
Like debates about planets orbiting in circles or ellipses in classical physics, so the debate between classical physics and quantum mechanics about the true nature of reality had begun long before Einstein and Bohr. With the aid of mathematics as a guide, those debates revealed both our own bias for symmetry and perfection and how those biases blinded us for thousands of years from seeing a much richer complexity about the nature of the universe we inhabit. And in the same way Alan Turning used mathematics to demonstrate how patterns could arise spontaneously out of homogeneous states, so mathematics also began to discover how miracles are the result of the same process.
In part III, we will look at how mathematics began to pull back the curtain on the deterministic mechanical-ism in which something new and different could only occur when a God performed a miracle, as if the universe was like a robot or a watch, to reveal that, like ourselves, the universe was alive because it had the ability - the "free will" as it were - to roll the dice enough times and produce miracles of chance instead.
As we will see, what atheists see as a miracle born of chance through the intercourse between classical and quantum mechanics, Christians anthropomorphize into a miracle of God. And they do so out of the same preference that Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe had for thinking planets must move in perfect circles, for the latter saw circles as divine reflections of a perfect God, while Christians see themselves as "made in the image and likeness of" that same perfect God. Like Narcissus, both had fallen in love with an image of their own ideas and "beliefs."
Comments
Post a Comment