If you believe in modern science, then you likely already believe that the impossible is real, the incomprehensible is true, the unexplainable is likely, and leaps of faith are unavoidable. I’ll describe the preceding and then, as I see it, some implications for belief in something transcendent.
The Impossible
Let’s start with the impossible: superposition and quantum entanglement (for a good video on both, watch the first 11 minutes of this TEDx talk).
Superposition
We all know that one thing can’t be in two places at once. That is obvious. One thing. Two places. Very simple.
Quantum mechanics, however, necessitates that one thing is in every place that it can be at the same time. One thing. Everywhere it can be.
Superposition has been abundantly demonstrated, most famously with the “double-slit experiment” in which a single photon passes through two separate slits simultaneously. Not possible. Definitely happens and has been proven time and time again in many different ways.
Quantum Entanglement
According to general relativity, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
And yet, when you entangle two particles, measuring one of them will cause a change in the other particle no matter how far apart those particles are. And, importantly, this change will either be instantaneous or will happen at faster than the speed of light. In essence, these particles interact instantly with one another as if there was no space at all between them. This is called “nonlocality.” No matter how much space is between the two particles, they interact as if there is no space between the two particles.
Not possible. Totally happens and has been abundantly proven.
The Incomprehensible
Speed
Right now, you are traveling 1,040 miles per hour with everything on the surface of the Earth as it rotates on its axis, you are traveling 67,000 miles per hour with the Earth as it rotates around the Sun, you are traveling 490,000 miles per hour with our solar system as it rotates around the center of our galaxy, and you are traveling 1.4 million miles per hour with our galaxy as it flies through the universe. When calculating all the different speeds and directions together, you are traveling at over 1,000,000 miles per hour. You, right now, are traveling at over 1,000,000 miles per hour. Try to feel your speed. Try harder. Seriously, try harder to actually become of aware of how fast you are literally traveling at this very moment. Can you feel that? No. Understand it? No. We are aware that we are unaware of our speed. We comprehend that we cannot comprehend it.
Matter
You and all the matter around you are pretty much just empty space. To be more precise, you and the device you are reading this on are 99.9999999999996% empty space because that is what percentage of each atom is empty space. Given that only .000000000004% of the atoms that make up everything around you are made up of actual particles, it is beyond comprehension that we (essentially empty space) can see, touch, and smell things that are also essentially empty space. The reality of the physical world is absolutely beyond our grasp.
Time
The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. We know this through our measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation and the rate at which the universe is expanding. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. We know this from radiometric dating. We also know that we cannot comprehend that amount of time. And, yet, people often use time as a magic wand. As I will discuss later, the origin of life has, surprisingly, no scientific explanation. The most common scientific explanation is: “4.5 billion years is so incomprehensibly long that life would have, inevitably, come to exist.” Do you see the problem there? That is not a scientific explanation at all. It is saying: “I’m going to use this thing that I know that I can’t comprehend to claim that something else I can’t comprehend happened.” That’s not how science or logic works. If you can’t comprehend the former, you can’t say it automatically explains the latter. You can use time as a magic wand if you’d like, but you have to acknowledge how you’re using it — as magic, not science. But, in any event, we know that we cannot hope to comprehend the age of the universe or the age of the Earth, and yet we believe what we cannot comprehend.
The Unexplainable
Dark Matter
Science also tells us that things for which we have no evidence must exist. For instance, roughly 85% of the mass in the universe must be “dark matter.” We have no direct evidence of it, at all. None. But, if it doesn’t exist, then scientists have no explanation for how the universe can exist. So, scientists believe it does exist because it must exist despite the fact that they have exactly zero direct measurement of it or interactions with it.
Virtual Particles
Particles that we can’t directly measure and that pop in and out of existence must exist. We need them (or something else that we have no way to directly measure) for the math of quantum mechanics to work (see the Casimir Effect for an observable outcome of this unexplainable phenomenon).
Leaps of Faith
We might quibble about whether the following are leaps of faith, what that means, etc. But I’m putting the following in a distinct category because, at least to me, it’s not that the following are simply unexplained but that they require actual belief in the absence of evidence. For example, we can’t explain dark matter, but mathematically it essentially has to exist in some form or fashion. Concerning the origin of the universe, however, there is no precedent for the cause of the origin of the universe so there’s no math about what must have preceded it — there is simply speculation, i.e. belief.
The Origin of the Universe
As already mentioned, the origin of the universe has no known precedent. According to science, …. And, according to science, … But, according to science, … Yeah, there are no ways to complete those sentences when we’re talking about the origin of the universe. It’s not a scientific question. It’s a question of belief. Do you believe that something always existed? If so, what? Do you believe that everything came out of nothing when there was no space to come into? If so, how? If you’re going to have any belief about the origin of the universe, it must be a leap of faith. You have no evidence either way.
The Origin of Life
Evolution quite nicely explains most of the development of life (except for the conundrums of irreducible complexity). But evolution says literally nothing (again, literally nothing) about the origin of life. There is no credible scientific theory for how life could have come to exist. While the origin of the universe can’t be a scientific question, the origin of life could be a scientific question if there was any scientific explanation that could explain how things could have come together to become a life form. But, when you look at how unbelievably complex even the simplest of life forms are, it almost defies human logic to say that those things could have randomly come together or — in the very, very, very, very unlikely event that they did — that the life form would have continued to live for longer than the briefest time before dying on a planet not equipped to support life (and even though the earth’s environment is now supportive of life, we have no evidence that anything that is alive evolved from a different original life form, so it appears that the origin of life succeeded once on earth, and we have no evidence of it occurring ever again thus far anywhere else in the universe).
A person has to take a leap of faith here, but I actually think the leap is much further if you’re going to assume that there is an explanation besides an intelligent designer. Yes, both are leaps, but life looks created (life forms are essentially organic machines; if you came across a machine on another planet, you would assume it was created, so the fact that something is an organic machine that can reproduce itself does not change the fact that it appears as a machine and, as such, can be logically said to appear to be created).
So, origin of life = leap of faith (but an atheistic leap seems almost infinitely improbable; to me, an intelligent design leap seems more probable).
The Origin of Complex Life
But, let’s suppose the potentially infinitely improbable happened and life began on its own about 4 billion years ago, survived, reproduced, thrived, and then never did so on its own ever again (the similarity in DNA in all life forms — archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes — shows that all life started from a single organism). Still, another possibly infinitely improbable outcome would also have to happen on its own for there to be multicellular life.
Eukaryotes are the only domain of life that has achieved multicellularity — all others (archaea and bacteria) have been stuck as unicellular organisms for 4 billion years. All eukaryotes stem from one organism: the similarity in the DNA of all mitochondria shows this common origin, and it’s the addition of mitochondria and its energy production that allows unicellular organisms to become multicellular. The single organism that started the line of all eukaryotes is the only time in 4 billion years that a prokaryotic organism acquired the function of another organism (the mitochondria) inside its cell. No other prokaryote (archaea or bacteria) has managed the feat, ever. So, just like the origin of life, it apparently happened once and never again. Thus, a once in 4 billion year event had to happen and then another once in 4 billion year event had to happen as well for there to be multicellular life.
If we calculate the probability of life and multicellular life strictly based on the rate at which they occur (an eminently reasonable calculation method), the chance of both happening is 1 in 16,000,000,000,000,000,000. The Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, so the Earth would need to be almost 4 billion times older in order for us to expect both life and multicellular life to have occured randomly. Not 4 times older — 4 billion times older (and about 1 billion times older than the Universe itself). Given the improbability that life and multicellular life occur on their own, we should not expect to find any multicellular life anywhere else in the Universe, at least not anywhere we could reach. And the foregoing has not even touched upon intelligent life. There is only one animal on Earth of our intelligence — us — and thus we are orders of magnitude less likely even than incomprehensibly improbable multicellular life.
Free Will
Whether we have free will could be viewed as a question of science. If you believe that there is nothing transcendent (nothing beyond the realm of the material), then you really have to believe that there is not free will. Everything will be an inevitable outcome of whatever preceded it. There is no scientific explanation for us having thoughts that are not predetermined by the physical effect that preceded them. Even quantum mechanics cannot explain free will through probabilities because, still, your thoughts would not be determined by you but by whatever probabilistic outcome occurs.
Every person believes or acts in accordance with the belief that there is free will. That is to say, every person believes or acts in accordance with the belief that there is something transcendent, something truly not physical or explainable in any material sense. So, there is a leap of faith to believe that you have free will, but it is a leap of faith that everyone makes.
Implications
It is a bit mystifying that an intelligent designer is a taboo topic among scientists. The hypothesis that we live in a simulation is well regarded as a possibility. And it actually solves a lot of issues with quantum mechanics. If we’re in a simulation, then things don’t need to exist in multiple places at once; they can just be simulated to us as existing, like everything else, when we observe something. It would also explain how measuring one particle could instantly change another particle no matter the distance between them because, in a simulation, there is no actual distance and everything being simulated is happening on the backend and just being rendered as occurring on the frontend.
But, here’s the thing: the simulation theory requires belief in a god. So, as I said, it’s a bit mystifying that scientists don’t put intelligent design into the mix of possibilities when they literally put intelligent design into the mix of possibilities but under the name of a “simulation hypothesis.” There is no scientific reason why intelligent design through our observable existence is any less credible than intelligent design through a simulated existence. In the former, things actually exist, quantum mechanics exists, etc. In the latter, we don’t really physically exist — except still some physical world would have to exist in order for us to digitally exist in a simulation. So a simulation hypothesis guarantees intelligent design and yet also introduces the possibility that then there would be a god who designed whatever Being created us in a simulation. So we get the possibility of multiple tiers of gods: a god of our simulated universe (in the sense that the creator of our simulated universe could more-or-less have all the attributes that people attribute to God) and a potential God of whatever world actually exists (because the actual world would still encounter the philosophical question of an initial cause). People seem to be fine believing that an impersonal god exists but just not a personal one as put forth by theistic religions. Opposition to belief in a personal god, however, is not a scientific position, and it should be acknowledged to be a belief simply of personal preference.
So, just a quick recap to put things together. Scientists believe that the impossible is real, believe in what they cannot comprehend, allege that the unexplainable must exist, and make leaps of faith (even if they don’t acknowledge that they do). That sounds a lot like belief in God: the impossible is real, the incomprehensible is true, the unexplainable must exist, and leaps of faith are a necessity. There is nothing in science that says God is an impossibility or is even improbable. Science offers no explanation of God’s existence or lack of existence. Science and God are not contradictory. In my opinion, they are complimentary: science helps explain how the world created by God operates.