Physics as the new religion: will Millennials embrace it?
Many of you know that I am a Christian. I haven’t always professed that faith and I spent my teens and twenties reading atheists and agnostics such as Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Douglas Adams, and so on. I was aware of the work of Dawkins and Harris too. I was a regular reader of skeptical magazines.
In my youth, atheism was a hardline humanism with some existentialist approaches to personal meaning-making. In other words, it acknowledged that the universe was pointless and that any meaning needed to come from ourselves. Humanists professed Rousseau’s social contract as a basis for morality, skirting between the rock of subjective morality and the hard place of absolute moral laws.
Sagan was the most mystical in this camp, professing a belief in the numinousness of cosmos. He insisted that he was not an atheist. In a 2006 interview, his widow, Ann Druyan, said of him: “he was the most devoutly religious person I've ever known, because God was so important to him that it had to be true.” Sagan’s religious beliefs, however, were grounded in science and evidence.
Many atheists, such as Dawkins, nevertheless, followed suit, encouraging new atheists to fill their need for meaning with scientific discoveries and a general awe at the exquisite complexity of the universe.
These scientists wanted people to ground their “faith” in what could be demonstrated. Unfortunately, such beliefs struggled to deal with worries about death, personal existence, and the sense that human beings are irrelevant to the universe. Stephen Hawking in 1995 said on a TV show
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
This statement neatly sums up the beliefs that many atheists in my teen years professed. The universe doesn’t care about you. You have no intrinsic value. And you better get used to it.
This hard line hasn’t aged well and the extreme scientism from which it comes isn’t appealing to a Millennial generation of skeptics who can’t point to personal success, family, or wealth to buoy their self-image.
People who profess to follow no religion want to believe in something that is grounded in science but satisfies their existential itch.
Enter the quantum mystics.
In 2004, as the Millennial generation came of age, the controversial, pseudo-scientific documentary series “What the Bleep do we know?” took quantum mysticism to extreme levels. The series attempted to demonstrate, with little evidence, that the universe is made of thought and that we create our own reality.
Such comforting ideas misrepresented the science, but its success was a symptom of a growing desire to ground religious beliefs in the weirdness of quantum theory.
In 2009, biologist Robert Lanza attempted to put these ideas on firmer, less pseudo-scientific ground with his book Biocentrism, but the theme was more or less the same. Our consciousness is critical to creating our own reality. Lanza also came up with a solution for the problem of death, insisting that our consciousness cannot cease to exist, but instead travels down quantum paths such that its existence continues.
Others such as the prolific author Clifford Pickover have argued that quantum resurrection can allow a powerful being to recreate us in the distant future. Thus resurrection is physically possible. This is because information is always preserved in quantum theory (as far as we know) and so everything that makes you you continues on past your death and always existed prior to your birth.
Such mystical ideas address two worries that the new atheists failed to address in the 1990s that traditional religion, especially Christianity, does: death and human importance.
A third problem, answering why we exist at all, has a name in physics: fine tuning. Physics as we know it cannot explain why the universe is so perfectly tuned to support our own existence. Physicists have come up with a few ways to address the problem. One is using a multiverse, and another is a universe that evolves.
In a theory called eternal inflation, for example, universes are constantly appearing within a vast multiverse. Therefore, our universe is simply the one that worked much like the planet Earth just happened to be capable of supporting life because there are trillions of planets out there.
Other theories suggest that universes evolve and this explains why the universe is the way it is.
A book, On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, published just this month by a collaborator with Stephen Hawking, Thomas Hertog, is about Hawking’s struggles to explain the fine tuning of our universe. Its title, which echoes Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, suggests that it contains some powerful theories about the origin of time, the universe, life, and everything. Primarily, it argues that the laws of physics themselves can change and that this fact can explain fine tuning in the same way that evolution explains the fine tuning of plants and animals for their environment. It is unlikely that the book contains anything as ground-breaking as Darwin’s work but certainly it is worth a read.
In order to prove any fine tuning theory, we would have to be able to look much further back towards the Big Bang or be able to recreate those conditions in the lab, perhaps creating a temporary bubble universe in a particle accelerator.
Like evolution, fine tuning theories do not prove or disprove religious beliefs about a Creator. Instead, they provide a mechanism for creation. Most Christians accept Darwin’s theories, and misguided concepts like Young Earth Creationism are primarily an American phenomenon. Yet, these theories do provide those who do not believe in a Creator a way to explain our existence, so they are a necessary component for an Atheistic physicalist religion.
To review, then, the new religion deals with personal uniqueness, death, and creation by the following:
Human consciousness manifests reality via quantum measurement.
Quantum physics ensures human immortality by either resurrection or preservation of consciousness.
Fine tuning mechanisms (eternal inflation, multiverse, or evolution) explains why the laws of physics are what they are.
Moral issues don’t fall into the physics bucket at all but are explained away as a combination of sociological and psychological phenomena. The social contract is how we get our moral law while evil can be explained as psychological maladaptation. And the universe still doesn’t care about you. Rather, you must find love, imperfect as it is, in other people such as your spouse, children, friends, and other family. You must find meaning yourself.
My personal opinion of this religion is that it represents a yearning for God, one that we cannot escape because it is built into our nature. Despite its attempts to deal with various problems through speculations about the universe that fit into the narrative of evidence based science, it is not that far off from nihilism. Nor can it really deal with the ups and downs of existence, the uncertainty and the suffering that is inherent in life. No matter how comfortable technology and social programs try to guard against suffering, it will still come to all of us.
There basically two paths out of this dilemma: Stoicism or God.
Stoicism leads you to accept a universe that is uncaring and a life that is meaningless. A stoic accepts everything “philosophically” as the turnings of fortune or karma and recognizes that they can control only their inner life, their attitude. There is a lot of good in developing such an attitude towards suffering, but it isn’t for most people.
The growth of interest in having mystical experiences today suggests that most people aren’t that interested in developing their self-control. Rather, they want to experience God, yet they also want to escape the dogmas of organized religion. For many, this is a way of having your cake and eating it too. You can have a religious life but you don’t have to give up your own ego and your personal desires.
Most practitioners of traditional religion including yours truly would argue that this is a contradiction. And in the end, you cannot find God if you aren’t willing to give yourself up.
Millennials are now getting on in years, with the oldest ones in their early 40s, and being that age causes a lot of self-reflection. Once your career is established and your family started, you start to look around and wonder if this is all there is. Can quantum physics provide solace to that need? I think it is little different from placing your faith in tarot, crystals, astrology, and acid-fueled trips that many more people are discovering. It is a symptom of a great disillusionment in Western culture with traditional institutions. Disillusionment is the first step towards enlightenment, but we are not there yet.