Science's Holy Grail: "The Final Theory"

This is the final piece that, along with the preceding two, complete the trilogy of posts I planned to write on the topic "Science, Knowledge and Religion". I wanted to understand why some of today's smart scientists, despite their better knowledge of how nature works, still embrace religion. This is not a matter of debate, but personal belief, or as Steven Weinberg calls it, "moral choice". Science cannot prove God does not exist, anymore than religion can prove he does. What science has shown however, quoting Laplace from the late 18^th century, that the "hypothesis of God" is not necessary for scientific progress.

The title should be more aptly called "Physics' Holy Grail", because by broad consensus physics appears to be the only science equipped to handle this quest. Loosely speaking, the "final theory", if ultimately found, should consist of a set of irreducible laws from which will follow a complete explanation of the Universe as we know it. This last italic is significant, because we should not lose sight of the fact that the objective of such a theory is to build a self-consistent description of our perceivable world. For example, if an experiment breaks a new ground, suitable theory must be developed that can successfully explain the experimental finding, while at the same time being consistent with everything that is known until now. If in addition, the theory is good enough to throw up some new predictions of its own, appropriate experiments must be carried out to test and validate these predictions. In either case, if successful, science will add another layer of self-consistency to our description of the world. In the limiting case if and when the final theory is reached, this chain of sequential progress towards the fundamental knowledge will cease. Of course, science will not grind to a halt, because so much is yet to be known even about our day to day life (predicting weather pattern jumps to mind, and there are other equally important and unsettled questions).

As is almost always the case with fundamental issues, physicists themselves are divided on whether it is at all possible to find a final theory (even to the protagonists it is still a dream, though they believe it is a gettable dream). I do not want to get drawn into this debate, because my interest is at the very boundary of human knowledge, a point I attempted to address in this post. I believe the search for the ultimate truth, for example, satisfactory answers to "is there a meaning or purpose of life (any life) and Universe", "what and why is death", "is there a reality outside our perception" and so on, cannot succeed without understanding the essence and limitation of human knowledge itself, not what is merely "unknown" but what is perhaps "unknowable". Assuming, hypothetically, we can find the physicist's Holy Grail, we will only reach the outer boundary of what we can know, given our own biological limitations defined by the five senses and a 3lb brain. Physics, with its strict adherence to the inanimate, is inherently incapable of addressing such human dimension of reality. Biology, on the other hand, is still young. The new science of complex systems that try to bring disparate scientific disciplines together, may hold some promise, but it is too early yet. I do believe however that science alone, and not God, is the only mean of getting there. May not be the current science, maybe a "super-science" that unifies the tenets of physics, biology and all other sciences.

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Science and Religion - some more thoughts

Yesterday one of my friends told me about Beyond Belief, which posted a recent Meeting where some of the world's leading minds got together to discuss current conflicts between science and religion. While listening to their arguments, it became clear to me that religion cannot be discussed without its historical context. Religion grew as the oldest belief system among early humans as they were struggling to survive in harsh conditions without the benefit of modern science. As Einstein wrote, "With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal." Seen in this historical context, it is easy to identify today with Laplace's famous words in the late 18^th century, when asked by Napoleon how God fits into his voluminous thesis on celestial mechanics: "Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis". Science has greatly advanced our understanding of how nature works, and we can cope with many natural calamities using scientific knowledge alone without the need to invoke religion. Paraphrasing Steven Weinberg, "Religion is like an old maiden - she was perhaps nice when young, but now ugly". Of course, there is a significant fraction of the over 6 billion people in the world who still believe in a God, and science must own up responsibility to some degree for its failure in reaching out to them.

The question then is what makes today's smart scientists like Francis Collins turn to religion while at the same time pursuing a career in cutting-edge science. Or, why 7% among the fellows of National Academy of Sciences, the crème de la crème of American scientific establishment, still believe in a personal God. These people have over 200 years of advanced scientific knowledge compared to what Laplace ever had, and still find a need for religious faith. This point has not come across well in the Meeting, except in the talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson who merely pointed out the fact without offering a reason. I believe this has much to do with the inability of current science to answer some of the deep philosophical questions about life and Universe, a topic over which I went at some length in my last post.

Move on to Science's Holy Grail - "The Final Theory".

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Science, God and "Neurotheology"

Does God exist? Are scientific and spiritual pursuits fundamentally at odds with one another? Do people have an inherent propensity to be faithful to a "higher power"? These are some of the questions that have interested philosophers, scientists and laypeople alike for ages, and I am no exception. Being a scientist myself, I have spent many hours thinking about where my beliefs lay. Ultimately it all comes down to belief: many people, a substantial fraction of them scientists, believe that science alone can, and eventually will, answer all questions, and there is no need to invoke a transcendental Being as the ultimate cause. By contrast, many others, including a not-so-insignificant number of the scientists themselves, believe that science cannot answer deep questions such as the meaning and purpose of all life (human and non-human), what is life and is there an afterlife etc, and one must embark on a spiritual quest for an answer. There is a middle group of people, the philosophers, who have traditionally asked these questions without necessarily invoking spirituality. A major part of philosophy deals with the essence and limitation of human knowledge, and much of the modern philosophy is founded on the scientific understanding about ourselves.

For example, science tells us that our "perception" of the world is shaped by the five sensory inputs (via sense organs) - vision (eye), taste (mouth), smell (nose), sound (ear) and touch (skin). Therefore, our "understanding" of the Universe, which is achieved by processing these sensory informations in our brain, must also be limited by them. This remains true even when technological progress has broadened our visual and auditory capabilities to include ultra- and infra- ranges of frequencies, because they must still pass through detectors that convert them to human perceptual ranges. Take the extreme case of quantum mechanics, the triumph of 20^th century physics that has fueled much philosophical speculation. The energy-matter duality, or Bohr's famous Principle of Complementarity, says that at the smallest scale far below the human sensory resolution, an entity lives as both matter and energy (technically, they are called "particle" and "wave"). We would have never known of such a weird "quantum world", had it not been probed by ultra-sensitive instruments that allow us to see this world with our eyes. Theoretical advances, aided by deductive and inductive reasoning (without direct intervention of our sensory inputs), often outstrip experimental progress that relies on our interpretation of what we see and hear. But science does not rest until each and every theory is verified by experimental tests. This has been ingrained in the methodology of modern science: theory must conform with experiment/observation for the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Whether a quantum world, or for that matter anything that we see or hear or smell or taste or touch, really exists outside of our perception is a different philosophical debate altogether. We can at least agree that we know it exists because of our senses. Then we can perhaps appreciate that it is possible to have limits to what we can know. It is important to be aware of this boundary of our science-based knowledge, because only then can we objectively address the questions we began with. If we are indeed biologically limited - by our five senses and the finite brain capacity - in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, then perhaps we can never answer the fundamental philosophical questions about life and death. This is akin to attempting to understand the whole from within, by being a part of the whole. To some they are not even the right questions to ask ("science does not care about the meaning or purpose of life"), but to me such a stance merely skirts the issue. People will ask these questions as long as human beings exist as a species, and the quest for a satisfactory answer will never cease.

So, does God exist? It is interesting to read what Dr. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, has had to say about this yesterday. It is not uncommon for scientists to privately hold faith in God, but it is rare for a top-flight scientist to profess such faith on a public forum. Many (including myself) would share his lack of confidence in current science in answering deep questions about life, death and Universe, but some (me included) would balk at taking the "leap of faith" in embracing God as he did. There was a significant study reported the same day on whether human brain is structurally and functionally hard-wired for faith, in what is known as the budding field of "Neurotheology". It is not hard to imagine an evolutionary implication of such a structural modification, if it could help early humans in survival by inducing, for example, group behavior, as pointed out in the report.

To wrap up, I do not believe that science, at least in its present form, is capable of answering the fundamental questions about ourselves and the world we live in. We may know the answer some day, or we may never know. It is an interesting challenge to get as close to the truth as possible, and I do believe science is the only vehicle in this rewarding journey. I am an atheist in that I do not believe there is an anthropomorphic God "out there", whose sole purpose is to improve human life (at the cost of other lives, if necessary). I am also religious in the same sense Einstein was religious, and I share his belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings".

Go on to Science and Religion - some more thoughts.

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