A God That Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet - Hardcover

Abrams, Nancy Ellen

 
9780807073391: A God That Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0807073393 ISBN 13: 9780807073391
Verlag: Beacon Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A paradigm-shifting blend of science, religion, and philosophy for the agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious, and scientifically minded reader
 
Many people are fed up with the way traditional religion alienates them. Too often it perpetuates conflict, vilifies science, and undermines reason. Nancy Abrams—a philosopher of science, lawyer, and lifelong atheist—is among these people, but she has also found freedom in imagining a higher power.
 
In A God That Could Be Real, Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about God. She dismantles several common assumptions about God and shows why an omniscient, omnipotent God that created the universe and plans what happens is incompatible with science—but that this doesn’t preclude a God that can comfort and empower us.
 
Moving away from traditional arguments for God, Abrams finds something worthy of the name “God” in the new science of emergence: just as a complex ant hill emerges from the collective behavior of individually clueless ants, and just as the global economy emerges from the interactions of billions of individuals’ choices, God, she argues, is an “emergent phenomenon” that arises from the staggering complexity of humanity’s collective aspirations and is in dialogue with every individual. This God did not create the universe—it created the meaning of the universe. It’s not universal—it’s planetary. It can’t change the world, but it helps us change the world. A God that could be real, Abrams shows us, is what humanity needs to inspire us to collectively cooperate to protect our warming planet and create a long-term civilization.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Ellen Abrams is coauthor with Joel R. Primack, of The View from the Center of the Universe and The New Universe and the Human Future.

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From Chapter 2: "A God That Can't Be Real

Science can never tell you with certainty what’s true, since there’s always the possibility that some future discovery will rule it out. But science can often tell you with certainty what’s not true. Galileo, for example, showed with telescopic evidence that the heavenly spheres could not exist, even though he could not actually prove that Earth moves around the sun. When scientists produce the evidence that convincingly rules out the impossible, there’s no point in arguing. It’s over. Grace lies in accepting and recalculating. That’s how science moves forward.

What if we thought this way about God? What if we took the evidence of a new cosmic reality seriously and became willing to rule out the impossible? What if we cleared away those distracting
notions of God that can’t be true in the kind of universe we actually live in? God can be imagined to do or be anything, but the goal of this book is to find a God that is real.

It’s amazing how many unnecessary requirements have gotten tacked onto God. Unnecessary requirements are harmful. They divide us from each other, since different people see them differently; worse, they divide us from our own rational selves. A religion that credits God with powers that can’t exist in this universe sets its followers up for inevitable doubt, which in turn requires of them an exhausting effort to jack up their faith in order to fight the evidence against it. This is self-sabotage. People are expending all that effort and worry to defend “characteristics” of God that no one really needs.

So here’s a chance to pare our definition of God down to the essentials.

In my quest for a believable higher power, I decided to look one by one at the reasons God seemed unbelievable and ask if they really matter or whether they are merely traditional attributes. The results of this exercise amazed me.

Not one characteristic that conflicts with science turns out to matter. We can let them go.

Shakespeare said it best in Richard II: “Superfluous branches we lop away that bearing boughs may live.” Here are the branches that must be lopped away that a real God may live. These beliefs can’t be literally true in our universe. To the extent we cling to these images, even as metaphors, we are rejecting the real universe:

1. God existed before the universe.
2. God created the universe.
3. God knows everything.
4. God plans what happens.
5. God can choose to violate the laws of nature.

I know that approaching with any level of scientific rigor something so personal, so cherished, so core touching as God may be hard at first. But the price of a real God is that we have to consciously let go of what makes it unreal. God can’t be everything or it will be nothing. We all need hope and comfort and inspiration, but we also need the built-in bullshit detector of science.

If you’ve never taken these five ideas literally but instead have seen God as simply a word for the sense of wonder, of the unknown, of endless possibility, of cosmic connection, and of the opportunity to not need all the answers, then it may perhaps seem silly to bother refuting them one by one. Yet I would be surprised if your sense of wonder, of the unknown cosmic connection, and endless possibility connected with the idea of God was not based on an unconscious lifelong association of God with at least some of these impossible characteristics.

1. God could not have existed before the universe.

The history of the universe tells us that complexity evolves from simpler states of being, so there could not have been an intelligence complex enough to design anything at all, let alone a universe, before cosmic evolution even began.

What I’m about to say about the universe is based not only on direct astronomical observations but also on supercomputer simulations. The two standard ways of doing astronomy used to be theory and observation, but simulation is a new way. Direct observation of the universe in many cases is impossible, since dark matter and dark energy, which are most of the universe, are invisible, and because events on the scale of the universe happen across such vast stretches of time that a human lifetime is far too short to experience them. Theory is also inadequate because, no matter how sophisticated it may be, it can’t predict in any detail the kind of awesome transformations that had to happen for primordial particles and energy to turn into galaxies, stars, and planets. But supercomputers can predict them, to a surprising degree. The availability of supercomputers is a key reason why scientific cosmology has entered a golden age.

Supercomputers enable scientists to collapse billions of years of evolution into minutes, and billions of light-years onto a computer screen. My husband’s team of astrophysicists, for example, has several times simulated the evolution, from the Big Bang to today, of a representative cube of universe a billion light-years on a side. The team ran the simulations according to different theoretical assumptions in order to test those assumptions. The supercomputer—the equivalent of fourteen thousand top-of-the-line Intel computers working for two months—can track the motions of many billions of particles and cross-correlate their interactions with all the others for (a simulated) 13.8 billion years.

My husband’s team then compares the final universe produced by the simulation to the real universe as telescopes directly observe it; the computers predict what the observational astronomers will find. Only if the simulated and real universes match were the initial assumptions right. They match in incredible detail.* When the simulation is not stopped at today but allowed to run, we are watching a simulation of the future of our universe.

Not only cosmology but many fields, from neuroscience to climate science, have leaped ahead since the advent of supercomputer simulation. Here, in an abbreviated and simplified form, is what
modern cosmology tells us about our origins.

Right after the Big Bang there was nothing but rapidly moving elementary particles and energy, not even atoms yet, though the simplest atoms, hydrogen and helium, formed after a few hundred
thousand years. The early universe was smooth, expanding but not turbulent. Spacetime (space and time in the universe have since Einstein been understood to be a continuum) came into existence wrinkled, and the wrinkles expanded with the universe. For billions of years primeval particles of dark matter flowed toward the wrinkles by gravitational attraction alone. The dark matter formed clumps along the wrinkles through a process that astronomers enigmatically call “violent relaxation.” Up to here, our cosmic history was simple, governed by pure physics. Scientists deeply understand that era. But as time passed, enormous transformations came about,
and the complexity that resulted is much harder to understand. The immense gravity of the dark matter clumps drew in clouds of hydrogen and helium, which cooled and collapsed to the centers of the clumps, igniting as stars. Surrounded by a halo of dark matter, the stars cooked up inside themselves the heavier atoms, like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, and the nearly a hundred natural atoms that are heavier than helium and make up most of the periodic table of the elements. The biggest stars exploded in supernovas and spewed these heavy atoms into space as pure stardust to soar for eons. The intermingling stardust of thousands of supernovas, which had occurred over many eras, got pulled into the gravitational field of our forming solar system, and 4.6 billion years ago the...

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Verlag
Beacon Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0807073393
ISBN 13 
9780807073391
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
200
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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