One reason why some particle physicists specifically, and scientists in general, argue against a cosmos created by conscious forces has to do with power. Scientists are the high priests of the modern and postmodern eras. They hold sway by being experts through logical means of knowing, which means through the powers of mathematics, the scientific method and rationality in general. Today, these technical disciplines hold sway as the ultimate means of knowing just about anything. It’s often said that, when confronted with a problem, we should ask an expert. More often than not, that expert is trained in one of the STEM fields.

So, it’s not surprising that scientists should champion what gives them authority, access, and notoriety, not to mention grant funding. When power is at stake, our egos are usually involved as well. Status, self-regard, a sense of achievement, and ambition are part of the scientific method. Not officially, of course, but because humans can’t observe, reason or experiment with objectivity. The ideal is objectivity, but the process – whether mathematical or scientific, is tainted with subjectivity. Why shouldn’t the reductionists champion their own fields of knowledge to the exclusion of others? It’s what theologians used to do. It’s what philosophers – from which science came – did. It’s very human to do that.  

And yet if rational ways of understanding are held up as the only way to the truth, or at least as superior modes of apprehension, then scientists are seen as closer to truth than the rest of us. I have to admit that I’m a Mr. Know-It-All. It feeds my ego to believe I’m smart, maybe smarter than you. Maybe I think I’m the most intelligent one in the room. Or so I think. And I use the word ‘think’ in two senses here. First, as an expression of my belief in intelligence as a superior way of knowing. And second, as a logical method of understanding.

And that may be another reason why some materialists believe they can prove that the universe was created solely by mindless processes. They have these very well-developed faculties – logic, intelligence, mathematics, the scientific method, engineering – in which they immerse themselves and feel very comfortable. You tend to stay in the places you feel comfortable, right? You don’t stray into other disciplines in which you might not excel as well, or about which you’re relatively ignorant. If you’re creative, you may delve into theatre or music. If you’re mechanically-minded, you may bury your head under the hood of a car. Yet the spiritual journey isn’t a linear, straight-line process like an experiment or like a proof often is. The nonlogical way can be frustrating, so if you have well-developed intellectual faculties, you may dwell in logic, which tells you there’s nothing real unless it’s nonfalsifiable by the scientific method.

I’ve read that in Western Christendom during the Medieval period, there was no concept of atheism. We may find that hard to believe, but the idea of No God was alien to the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages, as well as to the uneducated of that era. I can imagine that the priests of the day were in some sense much like the reductionists are today. They beheld themselves and were beheld by others as learned men who held the final Answer, who spoke the last word. Back then, ecclesiastical courts often had the ultimate say in matters which today, we’d regard as the province of science. You could be branded as a heretic for hewing to the wrong opinion and be punished accordingly. People were burned at the stake for the wrong astronomy.

The priests and other ‘holy’ men had a vested interest in believing in God and in a particular kind of God because that belief gave them power. They may not have consciously realized it, but they were, in part, advancing their own interests by convincing themselves and others that there was a God, and a God of a very specific nature. This highly particularized, Christian God ended up being, at least in part, a projection of their own minds. Yet since psychology as a discipline hadn’t been developed yet, they didn’t know what the ego defense mechanism of projection was. Since their power was religious in nature, their well-developed ‘theological’ faculty crowded out all other forms of knowing, such as science, other forms of rational inquiry, and any empirical argument which disputed their own claims. Sound familiar?

This post isn’t an attack on atheism, agnosticism, or scientists who are of either persuasion. Personally, I think the idea of God can neither be proved nor disproved, and I have a near-reverence for science and what it’s been able to accomplish. But a monological belief in any one kind of knowing is myopic. It’s very limiting when a particle physicist attempts to reduce absolute truth and prime cause to particles or to strings or to quantum processes. It’s also very arrogant. I think we all look at experience through a straw, and the straw through which a scientist sees reality is no bigger than yours or mine.

It’s just an observation, but some of the brittle scientific arguments against a universe of conscious cause are motivated not by honest logic, but possibly by ulterior motives, which may include power, status, fame or money, just as some popes sought the throne for political power. The scientific method may be infallible, but those who practice it aren’t. They’re as subject to their humanness as the rest of us, liable to subjectivity in thought, as governed by feeling, and as vulnerable to unconscious motivation as you or me.

Atheists have a right to their beliefs and their arguments, but those beliefs and arguments are not elevated by logic, or by the logicians and scientists who make them, to the status of ultimate knowledge when applied beyond the scientific fields for which they were originally developed. Arguments are just that: points of view, always underlain by assumptions. Beliefs are assumptions, too. They’re all just choices. We should be careful, therefore, that scientists who claim to be pursuing an absolute knowing don’t rob the bank and leave other founts of knowledge with zero balances.

If I’ve pissed you off in writing this, then there’s probably at least some truth to what I’ve written. Or at least, there’s something for you to look at within yourself. Think about that.

Or you may write me off as an ignorant, half-informed fool. Yet to be human is to acknowledge that we’re all in partial ignorance, and that our knowledge is always only half.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just