The conflict between science and religion with which we are most familiar has to do with scientific results like evolution and a literal interpretation of Genesis One. The resolution to that conflict is now quite simple—a better form of biblical interpretation—namely, a recognition that biblical truth is not about the ancient science of the biblical writers. The Bible is about something far more profound. The contents of the Biblical symbols are capable of evoking deep truth about our own human existence.
For example, we can view the first chapter of Genesis as about the goodness of nature and about the goodness of the essence of our human nature, rather than about how many days it took for the cosmos to arrive at its present state. Similarly, the virgin birth of Jesus as not about his literal biological origins, but about the quality of his relation with the Final Originator of all things, a type of “birth” that is possible for you and me as well as Jesus. As John’s gospel so clearly points out, those who can receive the truth that Jesus presents are also virgin born.
In this essay I am going to deal with a more difficult issue: what do we say to people who misunderstand the nature of science as support for their conviction that the cause-and-effect thoughtfulness so prominent in our sciences supports the notion that there is no freedom for which we could be set free by any means—by Christ, by psychology, or by the meditation practices of the Buddha?
Determined to be Freedom and Free to be Determined
Joan Tollifson, in her book Death: the end of self-improvement, tells about her father’s philosophy of life:
My father who read books about Einstein and the fourth dimension was a determinist who told me early on that the universe was an interconnected and interdependent whole in which everything was the cause-and-effect of everything else. He told me that waving his arm at just that moment was the result of infinite causes and conditions and could not be other than exactly that wave at that moment. He told me this applied to every thought, every impulse, every apparent “choice” we seemingly made and every action we seemingly initiated and carried out, big or small. He told me the sun would eventually explode, that there was no essential difference between a table and a person, that it was all a subatomic dance of energy. All of this made perfect sense to me. (Tollifson, Joan. Death:The End of Self-Improvement. Salisbury UK: New Salem, 2019. p 39)
For these words to be true for him, for Joan, or for any of us, leaves out a core truth that is absolutely essential for Christianity or any other long-standing religion. It leaves out choice. A true choice causes things to happen differently than they would have happened if that choice had not been made. But a true choice is not an effect caused by some other cause, otherwise it is not a choice. A true choice is an uncaused cause.
Of course there are many causes of our behaviors besides choices. And these ongoing conditions over which we have no control present to us the limited options for our choices. Every living animal choses between options, and these choices by animal aliveness are uncaused by anything other than the choices themselves.
Consciousness is clearly a component of living beings. This is especially obvious for animal beings. A cat is not only a complicated machine. A cat makes choices. Both cat consciousness and human consciousness are a combination of awareness and aware intentions. This consciousness in animal life surely evolved because it was an advantage to the species to be able to make aware intentions to avoid dangers and find food, sex, and whatever else optimized the liveliness of that particular living being and the survival of its species.
“Aware intentions” is another term for “choices,” and “choice-making” is another term for “freedom.” Consciousness is a complementary polarity of awareness and freedom. Awareness is the yin of consciousness, and freedom is the yang of consciousness. There is no awareness without freedom, and there is no freedom without awareness. We may not be able to ascertain the presence of consciousness by simply observing animal behaviors, but there can be no doubt about the presence of consciousness in the human, if we trust our own inward looking. Our contemplative inquiry reveals the presence of this awareness and this freedom.
We contemplating humans can notice the similarities and differences of cat and human behaviors, and can thereby guess the similarities and differences in those two types of conscious beings. We see directly only our own consciousness, but with confidence we correctly project upon all alive beings some of the elements of our own inward experience of being aware and free.
Nevertheless, Joan Tollifson’s father was right about the prominence of the concept of “cause-and-effect” in both our ordinary lives and in our physics all the way from Aristotle’s science to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Cause-and-effect is all about predictability, our ability to predict aspects of the future. For example, when we produce the cause of striking a nail with a hammer, we predict the effect of that nail sinking deeper into the wood. Or when we notice the effects of some infection in our body, we imagine the cause of a set of bacteria for which this infection is an effect. We then seek to administer the cause of some anti-bacteria treatment that might have the effect of curing the infection.
The predictive power of our cause-and-effect knowledge has value to us in many complex matters. We could not honestly live our lives without it. On large physical matters, cause-and-effect knowledge is useful for predicting the times that the sun rises in the east and the times that the sun sets in the west. It is cause and effect thinking that also figures out the truth that this rising and this setting of the sun relative to our viewing is caused by the rotation of the Earth. Indeed, cause-and-effect knowledge characterizes the whole of Newton’s science and the whole of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
So how does the truth of choice exist alongside these massive pictures built by cause- and effect science? Let us first notice that the scientific approach to truth need not be denied when we describe another approach to truth, such as our subjective or contemplative inquiry. Some physicists object to having a second approach truth because they assume that cause-and-effect thinking describes the whole of the cosmos—that is, the whole of what they mean by “reality.”
The following truth resolves this misunderstanding. Cause-and-effect is only a set of powerful ideas within the human mind that enables humans to create approximate predictions of the objective flow of reality. Reality as a whole is bigger than the predictive power of scientific knowledge can ever encompass. Why is this so? It is so, because the essence of doing science is about group observations of public objects like animal behaviors, blood flow, brain functions, chemical reactions, electrical impulses, and much more. Physics, as the science beneath all science is silent about subjectivity. The physicist knows that he or she is a conscious being with a subjectivity, and that he or she is using the powers of that subjectivity to do their science, but the rules for doing science forbid mixing the scientist’s subjectivity with his or her good science.
The scientist is a conscious being.
Conscious beings simply do not fit into the cause and effect universe.
A fully deterministic philosophy of life is even a misunderstanding of the scientific method. The process of good science is a creative and highly imaginative process initiated by the choices of human beings. The shift from Newtonian science to our post-Einstein science has involved some surprisingly creative choices made by Einstein and the physicists who followed him. This deep creativity is true even though both Newton’s and Einstein’s physics are cause-and-effect thinking. Einstein’s own life, as well as Newton’s own life, denies that the human quest for realism can restrict itself to cause-and-effect thinking.
Furthermore, if there is no such thing as uncaused conscious choices, there can be no such thing as initiative, commitment, dedication, creativity or even thoughtfulness in the sense of intending to think about conduct of our ordinary human lives.
Even a small amount of honest inquiry into our own subjectivity, tells us that we are making uncaused choices. In playing a game of solitary with cards, we choose to play or not to play a card and where to play it if there are options. Though some thinkers work very hard to deny the presence of uncaused actions, our contemplative inquiries are constantly accessing subjective phenomena that are not reachable by scientific observation. Science is only one approach to truth. Contemplative inquiry is another approach to truth.
Ken Wilber calls these two approaches the “It approach” and the “I approach.” Wilber then lines out two more approaches to truth that I am calling the “interpersonal approach” and the “social-commonality approach.” Wilber calls both or these approaches to truth a “We approach.” Wilber’s and my own clarifying ventures into these realms of thoughtfulness find that rather than having only one rational picture that has the possibly of someday containing everything, we have four independent rational pictures that are each in a state of perpetual improvement or approximation to that One Overall Mysterious Reality that is unreachable by the human mind.
We each do all four of these types of thinking, and we meld them together into our own knowledge patterns that we use to live our practical lives. We may not have noticed that we have four approaches to truth, but that is the job of philosophers like Wilber and me to point such things out for us.
Measure-ability
Here is a further limitation of the scientific quest for truth. Physics and many other sciences require that the subject matter under investigation be measurable. But there are many real experiences in our lives that are not measurable—love, hope, delusion, hate, despair. We might poetically talk about how these realities have varying intensities, but we are not able to assign inches, pounds, seconds, light years, or some other such measuring method to these parts of our lives. These aspects of our lives are not measurable, yet they are obviously real, These aspects of conscious experience are basic contents in our contemplative approach to truth.
Within our strictly contemplative experience, time itself is not measurable. There are no hours or seconds or days or years involved within our contemplative quest for truth. When we are pursuing a contemplative inquiry, time is one long experience of now. Within a contemplative approach to truth, time is a flow of happenings passing through an ever-present now. The past is just a memory in the now. The future is just an anticipation in the now. In order to measure time we have to gaze at some sort of out-there object like a clock or a sundial or the cycles of sun or moon. Temporal objectivity is the purview of both science and measurement. Contemplative inquiry is the purview of states of inner realism that are not measurable. Furthermore, the experience of the enduring now does not exist in the scientific approach to truth. In physics now is just a dot on an abstract line that separates past from future. In contemplative inquiry, however, we know the now as an enduring existing reality, certainly not nothing.
The Truth of Science
In spite of the fact that science can never produce the complete truth for the living of our lives, the truth of science is, nevertheless, quite real. However accomplished we may be as a contemplative inquirer, there would be no dinosaurs or galaxies or black holes without science. We use scientific knowledge to organize our day, cook our meals, wash our dishes, build our houses, and thousands of other taken-for-granted activities. Scientific knowledge is an inevitable part of our lives. We all share in the scientific approach to truth, however much or little we delve into the research edges of contemporary science.
We humans are all scientists, however much we resist it. For example, the ever-evolving theory of evolution is stored wisdom we have learned from our collective human experience. We have no empirical justifications for rejecting the theory of evolution. Evolution is indeed just a theory that is still changing, but all science is just a theory. Some theories are short lived. Some theories last a very long time. Also a scientific theory can be shown to be wrong or limited by only one well-documented exception. But a theory like evolution is not a truth we can dismiss. This theory has lasted for many decades and is now supported by millions of facts. The same goes for the theory of global warming, the big-bang beginning, and the expanding nature of space-time. For a theory of science to be dismissed (or even partially transcended), some objective evidence for its termination or limitation must be found.
It is also true that a transcended theory like Newtonian physics still applies well enough to a wide range of matters to remain useful knowledge for many purposes. But Newtonian science is clearly an approximation that cannot encompass the finer points of post-Einstein physics.
These considerations lead us to a truth about scientific knowledge that some of us are loath to face. All scientific knowledge is just a guess that has not yet been shown to be wrong. In science we never have a theory that is proven to the extent that it can never be shown to be wrong. In other words, all scientific knowledge is approximate truth.
So what is it that allows us to see that some bits of scientific truth are better than other bits of scientific truth? Here is a quotation about looking for a new physical law from “The Character of Physical Law,” a book by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman:
In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if the law we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. (Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Cambridge MS: MIT Press, 1967. p 156)
Feynman goes on the remark that we may need to recheck an experiment to see if it was done correctly. And he explains how this task of theory guessing is a sophisticated process, involving a knowledge of the known facts in the field of inquiry and some familiarity with the other theories already found right or wrong. But the plain truth of scientific research is spelled out in Feynman’s words above. Scientific truth is just a guess waiting to be shown wrong. And the test of right or wrong to such guesses is found in the observation of physical nature itself by a peer group of human observers.
Subjective and Objective
It is true that all our objectivity is conducted by a subjective human consciousness, but it is a leap into nonsense to claim that there can be no objectivity, because all human scientists are subjectively biased. Our subjective consciousness possess the ability to be disciplined in the use of an objective method of thoughtfulness.
Here is a much stronger doubt about the veracity of objectivity: the facts of science are creations of the human mind. Nevertheless, the mental creations that we call “facts” are deemed by humans to be factual, because they correspond very closely to what a peer group of observers can take to be self-evident. Arguments do occur about whether a specific fact is indeed self-evident; nevertheless, if ten of us see a tree fall, it is simply true that the tree fell, unless some very convincing seeing or hearing or tasting or smelling or touching is added to our group experience that can convince this group of peers to view something else as self-evident. It remains true that we humans do not get to make up our own facts. The disciplined mind of the scientist formulates statements of fact from the sensory evidence collected by a group of observers.
While our objective inputs and our subjective inputs are part of the same world of Reality, it remains true that we have two separate systems of our mind’s thoughtfulness. Our consciousness is using our mind to look outwardly and our consciousness is using our minds to look inwardly. These two quite opposite looks create two different rational systems of thoughtfulness—one “world” of objects and another “world” of subjective contents. This division in thought is inevitable.
The Oneness of Reality is another matter. That Oneness cannot be thought because our thoughtfulness is constrained to be dual—the outward and the inward. Oneness is a word or symbol for a Real Mystery that is beyond the grasp of a human mind. One consciousness encounters One Real Mystery, but must rationally report that encounter in a stereo-two-ness. Objective and subjective is not a characterization of Reality, but a characterization of human thoughtfulness.
Our contemplative thoughtfulness cannot be reduced to our scientific thoughtfulness, and our scientific thoughtfulness cannot be reduced to our contemplative thoughtfulness. These two forms of thoughtfulness can never become one rational thoughtfulness. Reality is not humanly rational. Reality is unfathomable.
Our scientific thoughtfulness and contemplative thoughtfulness are both valid approaches to truth, each seeing the other approach in its own terms. Contemplative thoughtfulness can meaningly characterize the whole of science as an abstraction from our direct experience of realism. And scientific thoughtfulness can meaningly characterize the whole of contemplative thoughtfulness as a subjectivity about which science is silent.
Nevertheless, our human consciousness is using objective and subjective methods of thoughtfulness to approach One Realty in two quite different ways. Both of these approaches to truth are partial, both of them valid, and both of them approximate guesses waiting to be contradicted.
Freedom, which is the active aspect of human consciousness, can create for our practical living on overview of insights from both our scientific and contemplative modes of thoughtfulness. These two types of thought cannot be melded into one rational system. Therefore, our overall philosophies of life are required to think about these two modes of thoughtfulness as if they were apples and oranges that have grown on separate trees. These two modes of knowing are, however, two fruits of inquiry by each human consciousness seeking understanding about the same Oneness of Absolute Mystery.