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.