A Scientific View of God

Nancy abrams needed a higher power. As one of the premiere science writers of our time, she found both the Iron Age gods of the Abrahamic faiths and the pseudo-scientific mysticisms of New Age gurus wanting. So she turned to what she knew best: science. What she found is set forth in her important, cogent, and challenging new book, A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet.

This is not another book about the clash of science and religion. As far as Abrams is concerned, that war has been won, and religion lost. Nor is this a book of triumphalist atheism or scientism; Abrams subscribes to neither of those ideologies. Rather, this is a rigorously scientific and deeply spiritual investigation into the nature of nature in general and human nature in particular. It’s an investigation that reveals to her — and through her to us — the God she sought.

The key to her discovery is the phenomenon of “emergence”: the natural process of evolutionary mutation whereby something new, greater, and larger emerges from something older, lesser, and smaller that in and of itself gave no hint of the something new to which it gave birth.

For example, a billion and a half years ago, simple microorganisms unintentionally joined together to create systems complex enough to birth eukaryotic cells, the kind of cells necessary for human existence. There was nothing intrinsic to these microorganisms that made eukaryotic cells necessary, nor was their rising complexity predestined. Rather it was billions of years of random interaction that created a level of complexity among and between these microorganisms great enough to cause the mutation we call eukaryotic cells.

Over the next billion years these eukaryotic cells came together until they too reached a level of complexity from which something new could emerge, in this case life forms with distinct organs. Over the following millennia, systems of greater and greater complexity emerged, eventually giving rise to human beings with the capacity to make meaning, fashion purpose, imagine goals, and create gods.

God Rises from the Human Imagination

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes sought to question the validity of human god-making in the sixth century bce by suggesting that if cows created gods, their gods would look like cows. In other words, the gods we imagine always resemble those who imagine them. This is why the Jewish God chose the Jews, the Christian God put a premium on Christian souls, and the Muslim God chose Muhammad (peace be upon him) to receive his final revelation. We get the gods we want and who want us.

Put simply, God is a creation of human imagination. You may object and say that, while our ideas about God are creations of our imagination, God in and of God’s own self is something else. That may be true, but there is no way of knowing this “something else.” All human knowledge is a product of thought, and thought is always conditioned by nature and nurture: genes and memes. We cannot know what cannot be thought; so if there is a God beyond thought, this God is beyond knowing, and such an unknowable God is irrelevant to us. No one wants this God. Even Maimonides, who posited an unknowable God, insisted that this God revealed his truth in a very knowable Torah, an idea that salvaged the chosenness of the Jews and thus ensured their loyalty to Maimonides’s God.

We want a God who echoes our desires. We desire certainty, so our gods demand unquestioning faith. We crave power, so our gods empower pious elites. We are terrified of death, so our gods promise eternal life. We fear “the other,” so our gods condemn outsiders to horrific fates in this world or in the next. Our gods battle one another because we battle one another. Our gods love and hate because we love and hate. Our gods push us toward extinction and planetary collapse because our greed and arrogance push us toward extinction...