Uncommon Wisdom: Fault Lines in the Foundations of Atheism

Preface

When I first thought of writing a book about the problems in scientific atheism, I decided to seek out the most prominent (or at least the most vocal) atheists of our time and understand their arguments against religion. I had heard of the New Atheism movement championed by The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and I was interested in understanding what they had to say. So, I went online and bought books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitches, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett to get a grip on New Atheism. As I read through some of their work, I began to discern several distinct patterns:

Their criticism of religion was mainly directed towards Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—the Abrahamic religions—with scant attention to Eastern religions. For instance, Christopher Hitchens devotes all of 10 pages in his 300-page book God is Not Great to discussing why There is no ‘Eastern’ Solution. His description covers his encounter with Hinduism through Osho, and a mix of sex, psychoanalysis, and quick-fix spirituality. It seemed ironic to me that Hitchens thought this encounter represented Hinduism because most Hindus don’t consider Osho as exemplifying their religion. Richard Dawkins similarly spends a few paragraphs in The God Delusion mocking the trinity of Hinduism after comparing it to the trinity in Christianity. I found no discussions on the nature of matter, space, time, atomism and logic, and the intricate connections between these that exist in Hinduism. The level of attention to anything non-Christian was just underwhelming. I got the impression that the authors had not studied the different religions well enough to qualify them to comment. Although Daniel Dennett acknowledges this shortcoming, it doesn’t seem to prevent him from commenting anyway.

The critiques of religion were preoccupied with the politics, sociology, and economics of religion, not with its philosophy. There was a lot of attention to the crimes of religion—wars, intolerance, suppression of various forms of sexuality, child abuse, and, lately, terrorism—but little attention to issues such as alternative forms of perception (even a discussion of the problems of any perception would have been welcome), the problems of religious symbolism (which are as problematic as any symbolism), the role of concepts in a material world, and whether matter explains consciousness. Perhaps the author who came closest to discussing some of the philosophical issues that are crucial to understanding religion was Sam Harris in his book Free Will. And yet, his separation between consciousness and free will is so philosophically problematic that it would not survive preliminary scrutiny. 

There was absolutely no discussion on the biggest open problems in the ‘hard’ sciences—mathematics, physics, computing—and their implications for linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. The only area of science where the authors seemed well-versed in was the evolutionary theory of descent with modification, but even here the authors gloss over the problems with the origin of life, preferring to speak only about life’s evolution. The problems of atomic theory, the incompleteness of number systems and what they mean for the comprehension of meaning in machines, the problems of singularity in cosmology, all seemed to be completely overlooked. I concluded that the authors were scientifically blinkered. They give too much credence to the scientific triumphs and too little importance to the outstanding problems. As is well-known, in 1900, Lord Kelvin proclaimed the end of physics save for two open problems—black-body radiation and the constant speed of light. We now know these problems led to quantum theory and general relativity whose puzzles are still unsolved. Underestimating serious problems, and the revisions they bring, only means that when these problems are eventually solved, history will not view you kindly.

There was no discussion on the philosophical issues in science. From philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, I expected at least a robust analysis of the scientific method and its differences with the method in religion, culminating in why one method is superior. For instance, science is defined as the iteration of theory and experiment, but whether this iteration ever comes to an end is not known. This means that if you have a false theory you could not be sure if the theory is false because you may never encounter the contradicting phenomena. And if you have a true theory you could not be sure of its truth because you could not know for certain if contradicting phenomena would never be found. The greatest philosophers of science have acknowledged that science is an ongoing activity, always falsifiable and always tentative. Therefore, proclamations that science is in possession of a method that yields the truth are in complete contradiction to the best current understanding of the scientific method. There is an even more profound problem with scientific truth when we consider the existence of meanings. For instance, everything you read about in the newspaper or watch on TV is not necessarily true, even though it exists. Science infers existence into truth: because I can see something, it must be real and therefore true. Meanings draw a wedge here: things that exist may not be true. Empiricism is flawed in deriving truth from existence. And yet, if you claim that the religious method is inferior without examining the scientific method, you risk looking simply too naïve.

To be fair, all these books are quite entertaining. They are full of anecdotes, witty comments, and trifling insults, which, if we keep the seriousness of the issue aside, make for an interesting reading. But, of course, the issue is extremely serious, and it concerns not just the understanding of religion but also that of science and its open problems. My focus in this book is to examine both of these issues.

I would have totally ignored the New Atheism movement were it not for the evolutionary accounts on the origin of religion. They are so naïve in their premises that I became indignant upon reading them. These accounts view religion as arising from the need to find social acceptance, improve survivability, and instill collectiveness in its followers, not from the fundamental questions that begin the search of philosophical inquiry: Who am I? Why am I here? Where would I be in the future? What is death? What happens after death? Why should I fear death? Does it make sense to keep living? What is the purpose of my life? Is life in any way different from death?

There are two broad approaches to these questions. First, we can study the world and suppose that the above questions would be answered by this study. Second, we might look inwards, and attempt to understand the nature of perception, thought, innate psychological tendencies and abilities, the question of happiness, and so forth. Whether or not either of these approaches leads us to the desired answers, it is indubitable that inquiry begins in existential questions not in pragmatic ones. In fact, even pragmatic answers are rooted in answers to existential problems. For instance, if an animal has to seek its survival, it must instinctively know that it is better to live than to die. If the animal did not care whether it lived or died, it would be pointless to crave for survival, reproduction, or social acceptance. To even attempt to survive, thus, you must have an innate sense that living is better than dying, although exactly why that is may be unclear. The philosopher attempts to ask these questions although animals may not. To treat religion as being, in essence, an attempt to delude oneself rather than to find some answers to important questions makes such a viewpoint devoid of insight about any religion.

The fundamental problems that spark any kind of inquiry stem from an existential crisis. Most humans, however, do not care about either science or religion. The New Atheism movement worries about how most people don’t care about science, but they laud those who don’t care about religion. It may be worth asking: How many of those who don’t care about religion do actually care about science? For that matter, how many of the people who don’t care about religion even understand modern science and its problems? It seems to me that only those who understand science could care enough about it.

Unfortunately, the fact of modern times is that most people don’t care enough about neither science nor religion, not because they don’t know of their existence, but because there isn’t an existential crisis in their lives of a large enough magnitude for them to start asking the big questions. That the Earth is round, and it goes about the sun, that the universe was created by a Big Bang, that life evolved through natural selection, is irrelevant to their survival. Similarly, whether there is a soul or God, whether we have free will, how we perceive the world, are there alternative forms of perception, what is life and death, is there a purpose in life, etc., are questions that don’t bother most people today. Even most scientists do not ask these big questions. We might have supposed that the scientists are seeking truth, but they are not. Most scientists view science as a profession that provides subsistence, name, and glory, rather than truth.

On the other hand, there are many people who are neither practicing scientists nor religionists who are interested in the big questions about our origin. Clearly, their questioning is not motivated by an ideological commitment to any creed. It rather stems from existential issues about our identity, and our place in the world. To ask such questions, one must have an existential crisis concerning one’s identity and place in the world. Only the people who face this crisis ask such questions. For the vast majority, these questions are immaterial as they claim have answers, although not well-reasoned.

Before we try to answer these questions, therefore, it is worth examining the questions themselves. Does a stone have an existential crisis? If not, why do we? Why are we seeking answers to our origin—regardless of whether the answers are material or divine? Why does it matter if we emerged from a Big Bang or were created by God if we will die and nothing would matter after that? If the evolutionist believes that nature is evolving according to natural selection and there is nothing left beyond death, then why even worry about the question of origin? How does it matter how it began when you already know how it will end? What’s the point of looking into the past if you already know the future? What is the origin of fear? Why do we seek to know the world around us? How did that innate need arise?

It is important to understand the questions because if we don’t define them accurately, then we also won’t know if we answered them. Materialism tries to answer the question of our origin, without elucidating how the explanation can answer why we even asked that question. What kind of universe must there be to produce the kinds of objects which then begin to inquire about the origin of the universe? Unfortunately, materialism doesn’t have any answers to these questions. I don’t mean this lightly, in the sense of not knowing the details. The answers are not there even in an overarching sense.

Materialism is not a new idea. It can be traced to at least 600 B.C. in the writings of an Indian philosopher named Cārvāka. Theism and atheism have been studied side-by-side in Indian philosophy for a long time¹. So the contradiction between theism and atheism may be novel in the Western world but it is not in India. One of Cārvāka’s verses aptly summarizes all the main conclusions of New Atheism.

There is no other world other than this;

There is no heaven and no hell;

The realm of Shiva and like regions

Are invented by stupid imposters.

Cārvāka, in fact, was so committed to materialism that he carried forward this idea into a clearer articulation of how one must lead their personal life. The following verse illustrates this well.

So long as you shall live, you shall live happily

You shall take out loans and drink clarified butter²

After all, once the body has been burnt,

Where is the question of coming back?

Cārvāka epitomizes a person without an existential crisis. He acknowledges the existence of matter but nothing else. As a result, he rejected the use of reason because there is no material evidence for logic or concepts. There are only particulars in this world, and we cannot generalize them into concepts. There is no need for a moral life, or for being good to others because, after death, it would not matter. Cārvāka did not make any serious attempts to convince others of his materialist position because trying to convince them would mean he had a way of knowing what they believed in, which, according, to him is impossible. The world, according to him, exists only piecemeal. There is no way to connect these things using concepts, logic, inference, or induction, since none of these exist, given that only matter is real. There is hence no point in trying to formulate theories of nature, to understand the origin of the universe by generalizing particular experiences, or to form any moral theory of good and bad. Cārvāka exemplifies a complete and consistent materialism. If the New Atheism movement wanted to learn how atheism could be logically consistent and coherent, it would do well to study Cārvāka.

The problem, however, is that New Atheism is living in its own existential crisis. It could assert what Cārvāka earlier asserted, but that would not only deny the possibility of science but also annul any legal or administrative system. It would convert an organized society into an anarchist dog-eat-dog world. Therefore, New Atheism advocates a new hodge-podge theory where we accept the reality of reason, logic, concepts, induction, and a host of other ideas such as space, time, continuity, causality, numbers, algebraic formulae, etc., which are all not material—at least not in the sense of tables and chairs—but denies other kinds of non-material things such as minds, souls, or God. I, therefore, call this view Selective Non-Materialism (SNM). No religious theory that I know of denies the existence of matter. The conflict between religion and science is only in the extent to which they accept the existence of certain types of non-material entities. Science too employs a wide array of non-material entities, which are used to formulate scientific theories. But New Atheism and most modern materialists deny the reality of anything beyond matter.

How convenient! Let’s first decide if we are going to accept only material entities or non-material entities as well. If we accept only matter, then science cannot exist, because numbers are not material things. If, however, we are going to accept some non-material things, then let’s define the criteria for permitting them into the discussion. For instance, many areas of science depend on the notion of probabilities. Atomic objects are, for example, described as probabilities. But what is probability? Is probability an object? Then why can’t we see these objects? If not, then in what form does it exist? If we formulate a scientific theory based on probabilities, then we must accept the existence of probability in some sense, even though we cannot call this existence a material object. What is that particular sense?

The problems of materialism are quite profound as they begin in the existence of concepts, numbers, logic, induction, and probability. Materialists are either ignorant of these problems or they deliberately mislead their audience into believing there is no problem. I have discussed these problems in my previous writing and will survey them in this book again for the sake of continuity. The central conclusion of that discussion is that we cannot define material objects without prior defining concepts. Therefore, if matter exists, and we are trying to describe it by taking a conceptual world for granted, then we are victims of serious oversight. We have committed to the pragmatic use of a non-material world to even understand the material world, but we deny all forms of non-matter. This clearly cannot be deemed logically consistent or scientifically coherent.

New Atheism wants to answer the questions arising from an existential crisis in a new way, but if the answers were accepted by its vocal proponents, they should indicate the pointlessness of the existential crisis and hence of the questions arising from that crisis. For instance, if you are a materialist, then why accept science or even the goodness of organized society for material enjoyment under moral commitments? If you are truly a materialist then what is so sacrosanct about life? Why would killing, suffering, and pain be problematic? Isn’t death another configuration of atoms, just like life? How can one atomic configuration be any better than another when both of these configurations are equally permitted by natural laws? What additional ideas are you trying to add or impute upon matter?

New Atheism adds a new idea to science, which is that order and structure automatically emerge in nature. This idea is drawn from Darwin’s evolution, which has never been adequately analyzed from a physical, computational, and mathematical standpoint³. Its popularity can be attributed to the fact that while other scientific theories need much training to understand, this theory does not require such expertise. So much has been presumed based on this idea that if it turned out to be false, I don’t believe New Atheism would have any foundation. I have described the problems with Darwinism in my book Signs of Life—not by analyzing the fossils, molecular mechanisms, or types of speciation—but simply by casting these ideas in a logical form similar to the problems of incompleteness in computing, physics, and mathematics. I will survey these issues again in this book, showing how the emergence theory rings completely hollow. If such an idea were true, mathematics would be consistent and complete, computing theory would be able to tell the difference between useful and malicious programs, and physics would have solved the problems of probability and indeterminism in atomic theory. What evolutionary theory supposes is thus an unattainable dream. 

However, this book isn’t about the intellectual poverty of New Atheism. It is about the origin of concepts and how objects are created from concepts. I call this the semantic view of nature in which material objects are symbols of ideas, and the ideas precede these symbols. Ideas exist as possibilities and they become real in time. There is also free will in observers by which they can explain the same phenomenon in different ways—this is sometimes called the underdetermination of theories by experience. The existence of concepts and free will lead us to consciousness, and, there is a need to distinguish between two kinds of consciousness—that which can experience one side of a distinction and that which can experience the distinction itself. I will call these two types of consciousness as individual and supreme. The latter can also be called God, but it is a radically different notion of God than used in Abrahamic religions.

One of the criticisms of New Atheists against religion is that its ideas and arguments are incoherent. I accept that criticism.  They are indeed incoherent to those who have accepted a worldview so different from the one that is commonsensically used that science has become the denial of commonsense. The commonsensical view, however, does not presently have a scientific foundation. The conflict between religion and science is a result of the conflict between science and commonsense. For instance, the everyday idea that the world has color, taste, smell, and tone, has no place in science; all perceptions are replaced by physical properties, although how the properties become perceptions is unknown. Going back to commonsense requires a science that describes matter as taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight. But it requires many shifts that are impossible in current science. I will discuss these shifts in the book, and how they are connected to the questions of the soul, God, and afterlife, in religion.

While I do not claim to clarify all possible ideas in various religions, I will try to clarify some fundamental ideas about the soul, God, morality, matter, based on Vedic philosophy. It should be noted that these entail a different notion of matter, in contrast to science. I will therefore not talk about whether religion is compatible with science; we already know they are not compatible. I will rather talk about how science can be changed to explain religious ideas, although the revisions aren’t motivated by the need to connect God and soul to science; they are forced by current scientific problems themselves. The conflict between science and religion, in other words, which New Atheism uses to decry religion, is also a problem of indeterminism, incompleteness and incomputability in science and without the solution to these problems, science will itself remain incomplete.

The main thrust of this book is that the conflict between religion and science rests upon an incomplete picture of matter in science. This notion arises from the employment of SNM, which pragmatically uses logic, concepts, and mathematics, but denies that these have a reality. Without an understanding of how ideas interact with matter, scientific theories are incomplete. The inability to understand the role of concepts in the material world leads to problems in understanding perception and conception in observers in scientific terms. Similarly, these problems also lie at the root of scientific incompleteness today. The interaction between ideas and matter requires a revision to the nature of matter itself, because without such a revision science would itself be incomplete. Once these revisions have occurred, however, the conflict between religion and science will also cease to exist. Of course, this may not entail the reinstatement of every religious idea that exists today. However, it would provide us with a clear mechanism to understand which religious notions are implied by the nature of reality and which ones are fictions.

The materialist dogma which stands at the foundations of atheism is an outcome of splitting science into three parts, and neglecting two of them: (1) the freedom to form theories rests on the possibility of free will, but free will has no role in science, (2) the use of concepts, mathematics, and logic is essential to science, but these are not regarded materially real, and (3) the world of objects described by science is regarded the only reality. How would nature be if we acknowledged the freedom to form natural theories and the concepts used in such theories to be equally real alongside the material objects which are considered real? Such a viewpoint would not only alter the materialist dogma in unforeseen ways, but it will also change how the conflict between the materialist dogma and religion is presently seen.

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A Definition of God

It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at