Hello. Long ago I studied physiology and psychology,
learning about how brains work. But then I had some extraordinary experiences
that convinced me of the reality of a soul or a spirit and launched me
on a long and ultimately fruitless search for psychic phenomena.
With my world-view collapsing around me, I had
to change my beliefs completely, a process that was challenging, exciting
and scary.
Now my scientific work concerns human evolution
and my inner work comes from practising meditation. Both raise questions
like 'who am I?', 'why am I here?', and I wonder how other scientists
deal with these questions. Do they ignore them? Do they keep their personal
beliefs separate from their work? Or do they find themselves forced to
integrate their personal views of life with what their science reveals?
Brother Guy Consolmagno is an astronomer working at the Vatican Observatory.
So how is it possible to combine the rigours
of Catholicism with the rapidly advancing science of cosmology? If the
truth is out there, is it one that the Vatican approves of?
Dr S. Blackmore: Brother Guy, you're
both a scientist and a Jesuit. I find it hard to understand how you can
be completely and deeply both of those things.
Brother Guy: It's funny that people
think that because, of course, most scientists until probably the middle
of the nineteenth century were deeply religious people - most of them
were clergymen - who else had the free time and the education to do science?
In fact, there have been a lot of people who've argued that science really
comes out of the Christian tradition in particular, and certainly out
of the tradition that accepts the Genesis idea of a Creator God, because,
if you don't believe that the universe was created by a benign intelligence
then you don't have any a priori reason to expect it to make
sense.
Dr S. Blackmore: But it obviously
does make sense in a way, I mean, I have a glass of water here and if
I drop it it's going to fall down, so we have to take it as given - we
don't have to take it as given that it's going to be like that because
there was a creator. And surely what's happened, I mean, yes, it is true
to say that science came out of Christian culture and so on, but surely
what's happened is that science has pushed back and pushed back the boundaries
of what God's needed to do. I mean, since Darwin, Darwin explains how
you get design out of nowhere, so we don't need God as a designer and
science seems to just push it back and push it back, so what's left? You
must be left in the little bit that's left, mustn't you?
Brother Guy: Absolutely not. Of
course, what you're talking about is the seventeenth century view of God
and the big mistake came in the seventeenth century theology, where they
attempted to take the new science, which was tremendously successful,
and see where they could fit God into it. This created what's been called
'the God of the gaps'. And of course, as the gaps get closed, you wind
up squeezing out God. If you think of God as the blind watchmaker, if
you think of God as the designer or the one who makes all the bits work
that don't work otherwise, then of course that vision of God is going
to be destroyed and you'll be left with nothing. There's a famous story
of, I believe it was Laplace who was talking to Napoleon about his theories
for the orbits of the planets. And Napoleon asked him 'and where is God
in your theories?' and Laplace answered 'I have no need for that hypothesis'.
Of course the theologians were horrified and all the atheists cheered,
but really Laplace was right, he was criticising both bad science and
bad theology. You can't treat God as a piece of the universe. One of the
unusual things about Christianity, about Judaism, about Islam, is that
we believe in a supernatural God, so God isn't so much a piece of this
universe as the axiom on which we base all of our reasoning.
Dr S. Blackmore: If you are saying
that you accept quite happily the idea that we don't need God to do the
job of designing, as in designing trees and other organisms and so on,
in what sense is he still doing something and not conflicting with science?
Brother Guy: That's actually a
great question and one that's been at the heart of a series of conferences,
very deep, profound sorts of things that I can't possibly follow that
have been sponsored by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
at Berkeley, by the Vatican Observatory, 'God's Action in the Universe'.
And there are some people who'd like to put it in one spot or another
and say 'Ah, it's in the quantum uncertainty. Well, that's just
another one of those gaps, who knows, maybe in another two hundred years
that one will be squeezed out'. There are other people who would pull
back entirely and say that yes, God exists in the universe much like water
exists in an ocean and a fish swimming through the ocean never notices
the water because they could never experience an absence but that God
allows the universe the freedom to evolve the way it chooses to or it
wants to. Part of the beauty of existence is that we know there are still
big contradictions we can't come to grips with. In the Newtonian universe
it was 'How can you have free will and the Laws of Newton that seem to
control everything?' The fact remains that in our day-to-day life the
laws of Newton do control everything and yet we do have free will, so
somehow it's working.
Dr S. Blackmore: Oh, but there
you touch on something so close to my heart as a psychologist studying
consciousness and studying the way the brain works and so on, it's no
longer about Newton and billiard balls and planets so much as about neurons
firing and how meaning and the perceptual world is created by the interactions
between neurons, but it's exactly the same problem you're describing there,
that the more we understand the brain, the less need we have for somebody
sitting inside the brain who has the free will and controls things. It's
almost as though we're eating away at the self in the same way we're talking
about with God.
Brother Guy: And yet you're eating
away at the need for a little self to do all the things you don't know
how to do otherwise and yet at the end of the day you've got a self. You
could take the Mona Lisa and describe it perfectly in terms of its chemical
content and the origin of each of the bits of paint, all the way back
to the nucleosynthesis of the chemicals that made up the paint and you
would not describe the Mona Lisa.
Dr S. Blackmore: Okay, let's take
the human brain of the person looking at the Mona Lisa and let's say that
we could really understand what's going on there. And let's say that we
could really understand how those neurons gave rise to the sense of beauty
in the picture, the sense of awe when you looked at it, the sense of empathy
with the expression on her face and all of those things. Now that wouldn't
take away the sense of awe but it would take away the need for some kind
of a mysterious self.
Brother Guy: But it wouldn't also
explain why the sense of awe is a sense of awe.
Dr S. Blackmore: No, it wouldn't,
you're absolutely right, although to me, I always feel in the end - what
appeals to me comes more out of Buddhism, I suppose - is the idea that
things like the sense of awe, things like the self who doesn't really
do anything, all these things… what we're going to do is end up seeing
that they're illusions, that the self is an illusion, that the idea of
free will is an illusion… they're still there, I mean an illusion
in the sense that they're not what they appear to be.
Brother Guy: They're not part of
the material world.
Dr S. Blackmore: Ah, there, now
you see, mechanical brain, I want. Ah, that gives me away as biased. (laughs)
I want to see these things as all part of one kind of stuff, there's not
any dualism, there's just one universe doing its stuff, we don't need
a supernatural one. But for you, you do, so…
Brother Guy: No, no, in fact, in
a lot of ways I actually go along with what you're saying and it fits
into Christianity. There's a great theologian who drew a marvellous analogy
- or comparison/contrast between the death of Socrates and the death of
Christ. Socrates believed in a dual universe, one of the soul, one of
the body, and so, when it came time for him to die he happily drank the
poison and that was it. Christ, who, if you believe Christianity, was
God and presumably knew what was going on, when it came time for
him to die he sweat blood, he cared. To him the physical universe matters.
When I say that it's not part of the material world I didn't mean
to imply that it was part of a different world or one that could be waved
about with your hands or measured with some instrument we don't have yet.
It's very real but it's not something that is potentially measurable.
Now I'll give you an example and I think I can see the hole you'll poke
into it but I'll give it a try. When we talk about 'spirit', most people
have this vague vision of Caspar the friendly ghost floating about in
the air and they think it's a bunch of nonsense, and in that picture
probably is a bunch of nonsense, but anyone who's been to a football game
knows that a cheering crowd has that a crowd that's not cheering doesn't
have, and, in a sense, you have to say it's hard to measure it, one way
or the other.
Now your claim might be if you could measure
every atom in every brain of every person in there you could come up with
the orientation that equals the crowd with the spirit, but I say that's
just the same as measuring the location of every bit of bit in the Mona
Lisa. It doesn't have the same meaning.
Dr S. Blackmore: Has there been
any kind of experience in your scientific work where you've really felt
a sense of awe at seeing something?
Brother Guy: I can think of one
time, I was a graduate student at the University of Arizona, studying
planets and comets and I had a room-mate who was telling me that there
was this comet visible in the morning sky - four in the morning you had
to get up to see it, Comet West, this was 1976. And I'd seen a few comets
before, just really tiny smudges of light in the sky and not particularly
impressive - I wasn't going to get up at four in the morning to see another
dumb smudge of light in the sky. But I happened to wake up at four the
next morning - the mind does that to you - and so I figured, what the
heck, I'll drag myself outdoors and just see if there's anything there
and I can claim that I've seen it. So I pulled on my clothes and went
out the door, I was living in a small apartment in Tucson, and it was
a rough, cold, desert night, and I'm walking down this pebbly road and
feeling very uncomfortable and wondering what the heck I'm doing out there.
I turned the corner around the building and there in the sky was a comet.
Like every photograph of a comet you've ever seen. Like something in the
ceiling of the Planetarium. And my jaw absolutely dropped to think that
things like this actually existed. And, if you saw comet Hale-Bopp, this
was five times bigger, I'm not exaggerating, I've talked to people who
measured it, it was five times bigger, several times brighter. And it
was only visible for a couple of days. It didn't have the big build up,
most people in the world didn't even know about it because it had come
and gone before the word got out, really. I understood at that point why
people in ancient times were terrified of comets. It was terrifying.
Dr S. Blackmore: It was terrifying
even though you knew what it was?
Brother Guy: Even though I knew all about the orbits of
comets and I knew all about the chemistry of comets and the plasma tails
and I could write all the equations for the solar wind, you look at this
thing in the sky where there shouldn't be anything… and it just makes
your jaw drop, it is so totally unexpected and big. Really, all you could
do was stand in awe, and breathe deep and enjoy it.
Dr S. Blackmore: I'd like to find
out more about your idea of God. What is he or it? The sort of ideas you
have are compatible with many modern scientific thinkings, you're not
some old-fashioned 'God is the thing in the sky' and so on. Nevertheless,
you need a kind of God. Tell me what you can about the properties of this
God.
Brother Guy: That's why I do science.
If you asked me what did I know about William Shakespeare, what I know
about William Shakespeare is mostly what I can see in his plays. What
I know about God is, to a large extent, what I see in the things that
this creator put together. A god who would have created this universe
is very, very big, to begin with. Clearly, outside of space and time,
independent of space and time, but one who loves logic, one who loves
beauty. It's astonishing that a good indicator as to whether a scientific
theory is worth pursuing, is a sense of 'is it elegant? is it beautiful?'
Why that should work tells you something about if there is somebody responsible
what that somebody must be like. There are moments in my life when I really
have to say I'm seeing something happening which, maybe it's just coincidence,
maybe it's a divine coincidence, maybe I can't tell the difference, but
I do see God acting in the universe. And how can I reconcile that with
a Newtonian mechanical universe? I can't, but I know the Newtonian mechanical
universe is inadequate, and the quantum universe will ultimately be seen
to be inadequate and any human invention will be inadequate, and that's
also true of human theologies, any human theology will be inadequate.
The fact that there is more than one or the other gives me confidence
that I am on the right step, if I had a perfect theory that explained
everything I wouldn't believe it. I also don't agree with, as a friend
of mine put it, 'well, if you believe in God, that must be a great comfort'.
It isn't. To actually believe that this stuff really matters, that there
is a good that we are striving towards and that we're always constantly
failing to reach it is in some ways very disturbing, I think you can compare
it to being in love. It's a whole lot easier in life not to be in love.
I have to say that even in my life I am in love, not with a particular
person but with a church that's very flawed and has done some really awful
things in its time and yet I still love it, with a science that's very
flawed and has done its share of awful things and yet I still love it.
Just as my friends are in love with their spouses or girlfriends, whatever.
It's a lot harder to be in love but I wouldn't want to live a life without
it.
Dr S. Blackmore: You're describing
something that's very familiar to me in that in your mind it comes from
a love of God and to my mind it can equally come out of the awe of the
scientific view or a scientific view of the ultimate emptiness of the
universe, the lack of a designer and the lack of a creator and the awe
of seeing that it's just here, and the responsibility that that seems
to bring up. And again we seem to be in a situation where we can both
perhaps talk in rather similar ways and yet you end up having God underlying
this and I don't.
Brother Guy: Just as I cannot prove
or disprove the existence of God, you can never come up with an answer
to the question 'why is there something instead of nothing'. In some ways
we're saying the same things in different words, by saying God is supernatural,
I actually am agreeing with you that except for the incarnation, there
is no God in this universe, there is not a God in the table, another god
in the clock, another god in the lightbulb. I am not a pagan and neither
are you, we agree. There is a principle that points out that atheism really
only arises in a Christian culture, or in a Judaeo-Islamic-Christian culture
because it is this culture which has driven the gods, the pagan gods,
out of our understanding of how the universe works. So that you can think
of the many gods of the pagans, the no god of the atheists and then those
of us who believe in a monotheism, a supernatural monotheism sort of someplace
in the middle. Either we haven't gone far enough and you guys are right
or you guys have gone too far and we're right and we'll never know, not
in this life.
Dr S. Blackmore: Tell me something
about your life as a scientist, what made you become a scientist in the
first place?
Brother Guy: I was a Sputnik kid.
I was 7 years old when the satellites started going into orbit and I was
a teenager when people started going into orbit and I was in high school
when people landed on the moon. How could you not be thrilled by that?!
I loved science fiction, I still do. I love especially the sense of what's
possible and what might be possible, we're not sure, and the sense of
adventure that comes from it. I've written this book called The Adventures
of A Vatican Scientist. I chose that word 'adventures' very carefully,
The publisher wanted to call it 'Confessions of a Vatican Scientist' and
I thought that would be a little bit too racy, I guess, or something,
misleading, certainly.
Dr S. Blackmore: I wrote a book
called 'Confessions of a Parapsychologist. Actually, it was called The
Adventures of a Parapyschologist in the end.
Brother Guy: Exactly. But it is
a sense of adventure, that of all of the things we do in the world, having
fun and having fun with what we're doing seems to be an essential of doing
a good job of it.
Dr S. Blackmore: So what's the
fun for you in science?
Brother Guy: The fun for me, in
a micro sense, is simply when I can look at my computer screen and make
a connection and say 'I see something that noone else has ever seen before
and it makes sense and it's really pretty and I can't wait to tell somebody'.
When I go outside and look at the stars, I know them, I feel at home no
matter where in the world I am because I recognise them, I know little
stories about each of them, both the story of the human beings that discovered
them and the scientific story, of why Actarus is red, why it looks like
two stars Alcor and Mizar. And knowing those little stories makes them
closer to me, makes them objects that are easier for me to love.
Dr S. Blackmore: The field you're
in means that you come across some discoveries that have really big implications,
possibly relevant to religion, such as life elsewhere on the universe
and we've seen in recent years not only the discovery of possible evidence
of life on Mars but the increasing certainty that there are planets that
might sustain life elsewhere. Was that exciting to you, what sort of effects
did that have?
Brother Guy: Absolutely. The idea
of planets around other stars, that was a thrill, for the science fiction
fan in me has wanted these for years and, instead of reading about planets
that somebody has invented in a science fiction book, pretty soon we'll
be able to write stories about real planets that are really there, and
the next step is to think about sending probes, and, by golly, the science
fiction starts to come alive.
Dr S. Blackmore: At the risk of
going back to a too-primitive view of God, I sense a problem though. You
believe that Jesus is the incarnation of God, that it's somewhat like
- not pushing it too far - that this world here is the playing out of
God living on this planet. Now, what if there are a hundred other planets
out there with life on them, are you saying that God will, I don't know,
sit back and decide 'Well, I'm going to put a Jesus - alien green Jesus,
I mean, whatever - on each one of these planets or some of them and not
others, how does this idea of multiple lives evolving again and again
on different planets fit with your God?
Brother Guy: I haven't the faintest
idea.
Dr S. Blackmore: (laughs)That's
a great one to work on then.
Brother Guy: And it's great fun
because all of those things are possible. It's of course dangerous to
hypothesize in the absence of data. We don't know yet if there are any
terrestrial planets, we don't know yet if there's life on any of them,
we don't know yet if they're intelligent life and we don't know what kind
of relationship, if any they have with a creator. For that matter, as
you and I have shown we don't even know if there is a creator. As we discover
these life forms then we'll have some grist to put into our mill - if
that's not a totally absurd analogy. (laughs)
Dr S. Blackmore: No, I think it'll
do, I can imagine them going into a mill and being ground up.
Brother Guy: It's very exciting
precisely because, when we see how God did it, then we'll know something
new about God that we didn't know before, and that's exciting.
Dr S. Blackmore: Is that really
different from knowing something different about the universe that we
didn't know before?
Brother Guy: It's something in
addition to, it's certainly something about the universe we didn't know
before, but it's in addition to that. It would be like as if the author
of Harry Potter died tomorrow and we discovered two more books in her
trunk that noone ever knew about, it would be a thrill. I hope that doesn't
happen.
Dr S. Blackmore: So do I. (laughs)
I want there to be ten more Harry Potters.
Brother Guy: Absolutely. In any
event, whether there turns out to be another book doesn't change any of
the books that have been written. There's got to be one last thing in
your life that you always hang on to. There has to be one starting point.
If I let go of a theory it's because there's something deeper than that
theory I don't let go of, the scientific method, the rationality of the
universe, the basic laws of conservation of mass and energy. I can have
a really beautiful theory but if it violates one of those laws I have
to let go. Conservation of mass seemed to be one of those until we learned
about atomic theory and how you can change mass into energy.
So there are times when you can back off, but
even that you backed off of because there was something deeper that you
still believed in, that you can compare it against. Ultimately, everyone
in their life has an ultimate touchstone, an ultimate metric, something
against which everything has to be based, has to be measured. For me,
it's my religion. For most people, it's their religion, whether they call
it religion or not. And, as long as you have a metric, a basis, that you
can work from, I think you will eventually come to a better description
of the truth, a better understanding and a closeness to the truth, even
if it's a different metric from mine.
Dr S. Blackmore: But I do have
some serious problem with this idea that ultimately it's a question of
whether it works because of the fact that many Christians, and I'm sure
you would say well, they're misunderstanding or they're abusing Christianity
or something but there are many out there who are real sort of do-gooders,
who are 'I'm better than you because…' - I mean there was much
worse, of course, the Inquisition, all sort of terrible things one could
point to in Christianity's past, what happened to Galileo, all sorts of
things. It's very hard to say that it works in the sense of producing
beautiful people, yes, it produces some beautiful people, but there are
some beautiful scientists, there are some beautiful atheists.
Brother Guy: There are. And, of
course, I'd claim that they're beautiful because they're products of a
Christian culture, even though they've rejected it.
Dr S. Blackmore: That's a little
bit of a trick isn't it.
Brother Guy: I can weasel out of
anything, that's why I'm a Jesuit. (laughs)
Dr S. Blackmore: Well I'm not going
to let you get away with it.
Brother Guy: The point is, that
it's the system that, when I'm doing it right, works for me. And it's
a system, when I see other people doing it right, even if they claim to
be atheists, I think they're being Christian and I think that they're
following the things that I wouldn't have known to follow except for my
religion. Just as I wouldn't know what was good science unless someone
had taught me how to do it, I'm not that brilliant a scientist. The joy
of Christianity to me is that, at the very least, it gives me a system,
that when it works, works beautifully. But more than that, it challenges
me, because it presents to me, ultimately, this person Jesus Christ who
was a human being, 100% human being and at the same time, God. And you're
going, wait a minute, now how can that be possible, this stretches my
understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be God,
in ways that I have never thought of before, and yet, having entered into
this religion, things snap together and fit in a way that gives me an
Aha!, just like science at its best. I understand why a sunset makes me
delighted, in much the same way that Maxwell's equations that describe
the sunset also delight me.
Dr S. Blackmore: Could there be
anything that you could come across in your scientific work which would
make you say 'My starting assumptions were wrong, that is, my Christian
assumptions, the things that I believe about God and the universe and
the way it works and love and beauty and all the other things you've talked
about… could there be anything, that would make you say 'for the
sake of truth I must give up being a Christian in this sense and give
up the idea of the Christian god'?
Brother Guy: No, not in that sense.
There are certainly lots of things that I hope to come across that will
make me realise that my concept of God was too small, that my understanding
of theology was inadequate. Because I know it's too small, I know it's
inadequate but, just as there's nothing in the science that I learn that
will make me doubt the scientific method, there's nothing in the science
that will make me doubt the theological method, they're metatheories,
in a sense.
Dr S. Blackmore: But the theological
method is different from the theological content, in other words, the
necessity of a concept of God. I can perfectly accept that you might want
to say 'nothing would cause me to give up the theological method', in
the sense of constantly looking for the truth through the kind of Jesuit
argument that you use and so on and so on. That's different isn't it,
from the idea of a God who created the universe, who's son was Jesus and
so on. That's what I'm talking about - could there be anything that would
make you give up that, still holding to the method of enquiry that you're
seeking the truth but that isn't the truth and actually there isn't a
God and Jesus was just an ordinary man.
Brother Guy: There's no way that
we can know that, one way or the other. So it's an untestable hypothesis
and I'm very suspicious of religions that are full of testable hypotheses.
They are certainly inadequate.
Dr S. Blackmore: And they do tend
to get tested and thrown out.
Brother Guy: And they do tend to
get tested but unfortunately they don't get thrown out sometimes. The
deeper question is what do you do when you come across two things that
appear to contradict each other completely? And we encounter this in science.
What you do is, you step back and say 'Hmm, things are more complicated
than we thought'. Newtonian physics still works even though we now understand
its limitations. The quantum theory will have limitations even though
we don't know where they are yet. And we will constantly be coming across
these contradictions, and rather than fearing them or running away from
them, you embrace them because it tells you there's a new dimension that
you didn't know about before.
Dr S. Blackmore: Thank you very
much.
