One of the driving forces of human curiosity on all levels is a wish to know why things are the way they are, and what causes them. Since at least the seventeenth century, however, science has not seen it as its business to attempt to discuss causality. Science studies matter and motion, and we predict how things will behave and frame our scientific laws from a growing body of observed and measured physical data, verified by a global scientific community. So is our wish to know causes an irrelevance, as many materialists like to argue? Yet if that is the case, why does it seem to be bred in the bone of humanity?
Indeed, some materialist scientists are so circumlocutory about our driving need to “know” that they perform intellectual somersaults in order to contrive physical explanations for the unknowable. Anything to avoid mention of the “God” word, in fact! Let me give you an example.
A few years ago, I was attending a scientific conference in a British university where a cosmologist speaker was discussing what might have been happening before the big bang took place, about 13.75 billion years ago. He ran a whole series of speculations about modelling proto-states of hydrogen, and argued that this was perhaps how the big bang had come about. Without such models and computer programs, he said dismissively, one could not escape from the threat of outdated ideas of a creator, or the “God hypothesis”: mathematical models and computer programs would replace superstitious explanations.
In the following question and answer session, however, I asked him from the floor exactly how he could attempt to model what had happened before the big bang, since all the solid, physical evidences that we possess must, by definition, have originated in and come out of the big bang. For in science, you can only hope to model what we don’t know by using the physical laws that we know already. So how can we remotely hope to model what physical laws, if any, were in operation before the big bang? The lecturer squirmed somewhat and admitted that there really was no way of knowing, and that it was all based upon theory, computer modelling, and back-projecting what we know already. So how, I enquired, was his imaginary physical hypothesis one whit better than the so-called outdated “God hypothesis”? He conceded that on evidence grounds, it was not.
I cite the above incident because it is characteristic of a not infrequent and hopefully unintended sleight of hand that many materialists and atheists employ as a way of trying to bring in causality by the back door, and avoid the “God hypothesis”. Yet in reality, all that they are doing is replacing what they see as a theological “superstition” with what is no more than a computer-generated secular superstition, and trying to cover their tracks with a plethora of computer-crunched numbers. Inventing, no less, what Thomas Hobbes (in a different context) mischievously styled a “Kingdom of the Fairies”: or, more plainly, a pure piece of fabrication. For try as we might not to, we humans are impelled to ask “Why?”, even if some of us feel driven to model imaginary states of pre-existent matter governed by imaginary laws. And we do it not only in pre-big-bang cosmology, but also when we contrive physical speculations about how life itself originated and where human consciousness came from.
Yet one of the wisest insights into this quandary came from the eighteenth-century Scottish freethinking philosopher David Hume, for in his essay An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) he discussed causality as observed in nature. And the conclusion is that we can never know causes, even in a scientific experiment. We might be able to say that billiard ball “A” imparts some form of force or energy to billiard ball “B”, and measure their motions precisely, but we are wholly ignorant about what “force” and “energy” actually are. We can only observe and measure effects, never causes.
Indeed, one might develop Hume’s line of thinking and say that we all know for certain that water invariably boils at 212 °F (or 100 °C) at sea level. Yet how do we know? Well, every time we have seen water boiling above a heat source and have inserted a thermometer into it, the water unfailingly registers the same temperature. But we still do not know the cause of the boiling: only that water, plus intense heat, equals bubbling, steaming, and a particular thermometric reading. Indeed, all we observe is a necessary connection, or contingent coming together, of all the factors involved. But what causes them to do so, we have no idea. Nor, for that matter, when the right carbohydrate chemicals and forms of electrical energy combine to form a human brain in the womb, can we know why the resulting structures will constitute a conscious person who will one day ask the question “Where did I come from and what is the cause of life?”
While effects constitute the legitimate world of science, what causes these effects belongs to a quite different frame of reference altogether: a frame of reference belonging to theology or philosophy, irrespective of what mental gymnastics one might perform. Yet there are still many materialists who adamantly insist that being concerned with causes or purposes is a sort of primitive left-over from pre-scientific superstitious times.
I have still, however, to encounter the materialist scientist or philosopher who does not remain locked into a world of cause, purpose, and meaningful relationship on an everyday basis, no matter how much they build castles in the air when “at work”. Just listen to a “causes and purposes are an illusion” materialist squeal with fury if his wallet or her handbag is stolen. The police must be called. Has the thief been watching and trailing me? What does he know of my affairs, and will he strike again? All available clues are handed to the police to aid detection, the retrieval of the stolen goods, and the hoped-for punishment of the offender to ensure that he does not strike again. In short, an elaborate panoply of cause, effect, motive, purpose, calculation of likely future actions and consequences, and a need for present and future security is brought into play. Likewise, find me a subscriber to “the cosmos is just a meaningless mess” school of thinking who does not want to give their children the best education and start in life that they can, with road maps for exams, goals, possible career paths, and future professional success laid out for them. Or, for that matter, the nihilist philosopher – when he or she is not actually in a seminar or writing philosophic gloom – who does not want a steady income, professional respect and advancement, good health care, and a fat pension on retirement.
But all the above runs counter to a science or philosophy which sees no meaning or purpose in the “big picture” of space, time, existence, and eternity – for if we subscribe to this, why should we be so obsessed with cause, effect, and purpose in our own small lives? Indeed, this asymmetry between the cosmic and the personal has always puzzled me: why, if there is really no “argument from design”, should we be constantly busy designing our lives, planning our futures, and arguing our professional or personal cases on the world’s stage? Have I, in my own simple-mindedness, missed something very profound here, or are we dealing with a naked contradiction between belief and behaviour that a more ungenerous person than myself might call hypocritical?
So could it be, then, that there really are direction-related causes that lie behind things, and that the self-same compulsion for order and purpose that rules our own human lives relates to some principle that really does exist in the cosmos, in nature, in the way we do science, and in the wider scheme of things? And if that is so, what is wrong with calling that principle “God”?