Religious belief is a common characteristic of our species as
all cultures, even the first hunter-gatherers, developed religious beliefs
Recent studies of the
evolution of religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in
supernatural agents, the role of ritual in promoting cooperation, and the
contribution of morally punishing high gods to the growth and stabilization of
human society. The universality of religion across human society points to a
deep evolutionary past.
In other words, the underpinnings of religiosity have
evolved through the process of natural selection for at least hundreds of
thousands of years. Natural selection is concerned only with fitness, and we
must ask, 'did natural selection get this right? Is the religious perspective useful
in the sense of conferring greater fitness?' After all, fitness is the only
goal of a Darwinian process.
The quote above notes avenues of research pursued by reasearchers,
suggesting some indirect forms of fitness that religious beliefs may confer,
such as promoting cultural cooperation and the enforcement of moral stability.
However, these are only by-products of religious belief; what about religious
beliefs' primary content, our predisposition to believe in supernatural agents?
Did natural selection get this right, or does our predisposition for religion
only confer fitness through indirect means?
In this scientific age, it is tempting to dismiss belief in
supernatural agents as clearly mistaken and incapable of providing real
fitness. Naturalism, or the belief that only natural processes occur in the universe
Nevertheless, before dismissing supernatural agents'
existence out of hand, we should consider that natural selection rarely gets
things wrong; it is a powerful inference machine
Getting it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount importance
to every living thing on this planet for more than three billion years, and so
these organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out about
the world they live in
How can we solve this puzzle? How might belief in
supernatural agents be consistent with our scientific understanding? The
solution suggested here is that natural selection provides us with the
propensity to believe that active agents run our universe but does not stipulate
these to be supernatural agents, allowing the possibility that they are natural
agents. After all, existing supernatural agents are a contradiction in the
sense that a discovery of a supernatural agent would place it within nature, so
instead, any agent for which there is evidence must be a natural agent and must
operate within the laws of nature.
We should note that those who believe in supernatural agents
may not consider them as 'supernatural'; they likely consider these agents part
of nature. Laws of nature are recent concepts before which philosophy didn’t
draw distinctions between the natural and supernatural. We must conclude that
rather than adapting us for belief in supernatural agents, natural selection may
have adapted us for believing in the less specific concept of unseen agents.
Discerning the identity of the unseen agents operating in
the universe has been notoriously problematic because our propensity to believe
in them is woefully lacking in specifics. We do not have a genetic propensity
to believe in a specific agent, nor is there much in the way of readily
available evidence to constrain the possibilities – the agents are mostly
unseen. Our imaginations, unfettered by evidence, are allowed to run wild. Cultures
have imagined a huge variety of specific agents, including ghosts, witches,
spirits, and Gods, but given a lack of evidence that could help select among
the possibilities, our imaginations are free to roam.
Intuitions about agents in control of the universe do not
rule out natural agents. On the contrary, what evidence we do have concerning
agents operating in the world supports natural rather than supernatural agents.
Understanding that natural selection has provided us with the propensity to
believe in agents' existence leaves open the possibility that the agents that
create and run this universe may be natural. Within a religious context, God
and nature may be the same. Philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza (1622 to 1677)
and scientists such as Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) have taken this approach
to religion and have proposed that God is equivalent to nature. According to
Spinoza's biographer, this equivalency was the primary point of his philosophy
Above all Spinoza's God is numerically identical with nature. God is
nature.
Einstein seconded Spinoza's vision
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony
of what exists,
Crucially both Spinoza and Einstein believed that science is
our best method of coming to know both God and nature. Einstein's remarkable
scientific insights told him that science provided our best route to knowing
God. He thought the very purpose of science is to awaken our capacity for what
he called cosmic religiosity
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the
knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation
of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty… This is the
basics of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important
function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and
keep it alive.
Beliefs about God in Spinoza’s and Einstein's tradition that
science reveals God in a form equivalent to nature is quite common among
leading scientists. As Stephen Hawking put it
If
we do discover a theory of everything...it would be the ultimate triumph of
human reason—for then we would truly know the mind of God.
To be clear, Hawking expects the mind of God to consist of
scientific understandings
If you believe in science, like I
do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you
like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition
of God than a proof of his existence.
And
I use the word "God" in an
impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the
mind of God is knowing the laws of nature.
Einstein went further than Hawking credits and envisioned a
science whose function is to awaken cosmic religiosity. His goal was an easily
understood science inspiring awe and wonder rather than merely the technical laws
of nature that practically no one understands. Only a cosmic science has a
chance of inspiring cosmic religiosity.
An interpretation of science with the power to awaken cosmic
religiosity might seem a stretch to many of us who have attempted to learn
science. Many find the attempt to be baffling, tedious and almost the opposite of
a spiritual experience. A science capable of awakening cosmic religiosity is
far from the science that is usually taught and understood. We design science curriculums
primarily to produce scientists and engineers who are productive in developing
new technologies. Only a few scientists, often the most creative researchers, are
blessed with a cosmic science experience. As Einstein described it:
On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is
the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who
realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer
work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength
of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate
realities of life, can issue.
We can only wonder at what a science curriculum designed to
inspire awe and religiosity rather than mere efficiency and productivity would
be. Unfortunately, neither the genius of Einstein nor Hawking was able to develop
a spiritual science. Einstein may have been hampered by his time's scientific
concepts that described the universe in terms of clockwork mechanistic
metaphors, sometimes called the Newtonian paradigm. He played a significant
role in the revolution which would sweep away Newton's paradigm, but it was in
the final years of his life before a critical component of that revolution was
contributed by Claude Shannon (1916 - 2001) in the form of information theory
Mathematically, information theory is just a perspective on
probability theory. It focuses on a function of probability -log2(p),
where p is a probability and names this function 'information'. We may
interpret information in terms of the surprise which an agent experiences if it
assigns a probability p to some possible outcome and then discovers that
outcome has occurred. If the agent had assigned a high probability to the
actual outcome, it experiences little surprise, and the agent receives little
information; if it is assigned a small probability, then the agent is greatly
surprised. We quantify information or surprise in units of bits. For instance,
if the agent initially assigned the probability 1/8 or 2-3, to what
turned out to be the actual outcome, then the agent's surprise or information
is 3 bits; -log2 (1/8) =3.
Crucially, the very concept of information presupposes an
agent having a mind or model which assigns a probability to something occurring
in the world around it and then is surprised to some degree when it receives
evidence of the actual outcome. Surprise provided by the evidence induces these
agents to adjust their models or expectations to those more in tune with the
evidence and learn and accumulate knowledge.
Now that science tells us that information is one of the universe's
most fundamental components
In general, since Einstein's day, human culture and the human
conception of the world have undergone an 'information revolution'
Critically, this new information metaphor has been adopted
and championed by nearly every branch of scientific study. Scientists now use information
theory to describe practically all the domains of reality studied by science. Examples
include quantum theory, fundamental to all physics[2],
described using quantum information and quantum information processing
In short, information is now a vital component of all
scientific understanding, and some physicists take information to be even more
fundamental than traditional physical entities such as mass or energy
This view exonerates natural selection; agents of the kind it
has placed in our intuitions do exist and may be observed and studied in detail
through the lens of information theory. Our belief in unseen agents running the
universe may be justified after all; an intuitive belief in unseen agents
bestows fitness as it is a profound insight allowing us to understand our world
better.
To say that agents inhabit the universe is not to say that all
these agents closely resemble humans. While we share some information
processing abilities with other existing entities, humans and their
collaborative cultures are the most potent information processors. Our
predilection for seeing human-like agents operating in nature often includes even
super-human agents, but this leap of imagination appears to have no scientific
basis. Although nature has evolved fantastically complex information processing
abilities, it appears that its crowning achievement is with humans.
This human-like aspect of natural entities has caused a
great deal of confusion for scientists. For example, some leaders in quantum
theory’s development thought quantum phenomena must include human-like
consciousness
In this view, science provides an alternative to faith-based
religion. The information revolution prepares us to view both nature and God as
active agents possessing types of minds and gives us the tools to glimpse this mind
of God. By adopting science as the best way to know God, at a stroke, this
understanding takes us from a state of great ignorance concerning the specifics
of religious agents, such as supernatural Gods, to a state of relative
knowledge backed by hard scientific evidence. Thus, the religious enterprise
becomes evolutionary; as our scientific knowledge expands, we gain more
profound glimpses into the mind of God.
This book focuses on the unifying role of the information
revolution in portraying all existence with a common metaphor. However, we explore
a slightly different common metaphor than information and instead focus on knowledge.
As we discuss, information only exists within an ecosystem of associated
concepts and processes, such as probabilistic models and Bayesian inference
that we call an inferential system. We suggest the central metaphor of
knowledge because knowledge is the output of information processing, and, as we
argue, it is the foundation of existence.
This book develops the argument that knowledge is necessary
for all existence; that the laws of nature are incredibly hostile to all existence,
and existing forms must develop autopoietic (self-creating and self-maintaining)
strategies to overcome these challenges and to evolve new existing forms. This
view may go some way in providing an answer to the obvious question, 'Why does
science find information and information processing to be fundamental to all
existing entities?' The short answer suggests that information and information
processing accumulate knowledge, that knowledge is essential for all forms of
existence, and therefore, information and knowledge are a common characteristic
of all existing things.
Rather than focusing on spiritual understanding, this book
focuses on scientific understandings, developed during the information
revolution, which support this new conception of reality. Hopefully, in the
tradition of Spinoza, Einstein, and Hawking, we may come to see that those
spiritual and scientific understandings are not in opposition but instead are much
the same thing.
This book focuses on answering questions concerning why
things exist. The short answer takes the form of a near tautology: things exist
that can exist. This statement is saved from tautology only by the word can. Can
is a deceptively simple word that papers over the complex and nuanced knowledge
nature employs to achieve existence. This book explores the general principles underlying
nature's strategy for existence, the evolution of this strategy over cosmic
time and its application to the several domains of existing entities composing
our universe.
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[1]
For example, we might consider telegraphy operators who have learned a model of
the Morse code. These operators are more efficient decoders if they also have a
probabilistic model of the relative occurrence of letters in the language.
[2]
The three forces of nature
composing the standard model of particle physics are quantum forces and the
fourth force found in nature, gravity, is probably emergent from quantum
entanglement (189).