Religion and Science

Science is facing a problem in explaining why tiny electrons and subatomic particles in the quantum realm seem to be behaving under sets of laws that have no correlation with the sets of laws that they behave under when these particles combine to make a biological world of living cells — and why there are completely different sets of laws when they combine to make the physical world of non-living thing — or why the laws in the earthly environment and the laws of the cosmos lightyears across would have no semblance at all.

It appears that behaviour and perhaps laws of nature change at every level, and there is a change of characteristics, so large, that the lower level is unable to explain the higher level. Like, the quantum realm of ‘quanta of energies’ cannot explain the realm of the world of chemistry, wherein atoms interact to form bonded molecular structures; nor can chemistry explain the various complex functions performed inside every living cell in a body; nor the cellular realm can explain how it forms different structural organs that perform entirely different functions. The gap between each level is simply so wide that as yet science is unable to claim how it would ever bridge it.

One explanation that has come forth is of ‘emergence’, a phenomenon that claims that whenever elements of one level act as groups a new set of ‘emergent’ behaviour arises. Like in human societies, the way a single person behaves is very different from how he/she will behave in a community or in a political gathering; the behaviour of people will be different as in their neighborhood, as a part of their ethnic population, as part of their nation, and as a nation in the community of nations. As the group to which a person belongs becomes bigger and complex, different sets of behaviors emerge in those groups.

With time, as discovery opens upon us so many different levels of complexities in so many realms of existence — one does think that perhaps one day, even though at this time we seem to be just scratching on the surface of so many sciences, that seem to be becoming more complex the more they are sought — that perhaps one day the links between any two seemingly disjoint phenomenon will be found! But will that change the fact that any type of individuals, be it electrons or atoms or people, have this incredible quality of suddenly acting with a different set of patterns that they are completely unaware of consciously, rather it seems that that behavior was embedded in the unconscious levels of those existences, and that its spontaneous ‘emergence’ must only be an illusion, when the whole program was already there in the deep.

But Einstein went another step forward, when he said, “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”, meaning that in this extremely complex universe, with multiple levels in a multitude of diverse, widely spread and intricate systems, how is the human mind capable of understanding, or at least be aware of all these systems, and moreover, how the human mind possesses tools, such as language, mathematics, analytics, historical accumulation, machine-making and so on, and how these tools are exactly the right ones that have opened up so much information about everything that is so far known — tools that are based in the mental faculties and in human language.

Linguist Noam Chomsky is of the idea that language is ‘abstract’ in nature. Though humans have many cognitive systems, like, our capacity to organise visual space; to deal with abstract properties of the number system; our ability to make sense of the social structures in which we play a role etc, but the spoken language, whose seat is the mind, not the brain, is ‘abstract’ — because the mind deals with abstractions, and these abstractions are communicated via language. The metaphysical framework, thus developed, deals with issues that transcend sense experience and are founded solely on reason, because ‘reason’ is the playing field of the mind, for it is the mind that thinks of the nature of things as they really are rather than as they appear.

So, human language and thought, both exhibit a universality, wherein all that appears to the senses are gladly accepted as reality, but wherein there are immense number of abstractions that talk of phenomenon that are not sensual yet real, and of realities yet to be explored. Chomsky also deems another property of human language, ‘creativity’ — which is the capability of producing and understanding sentences never uttered or heard before! This ‘creativity’ of language testifies of the creativity of the mind from where it has originated, meaning that the mind is capable of creating new ideation, conceptualisation and phenomenalisation — which all help in understanding our world better. In fact, ideas are ‘emergent’. As new phenomenon grow over old ones and the landscape of knowledge becomes more and more complex, new, unprecedented ideas emerge at their pinnacle!

Coming down from complexity and diversity to emergence, and the awesome possibility of a body-aided soul that surprisingly understands it all, and ‘emergence’ that makes it possible to assimilate different levels and make them workable, one is awed especially for the fact that how is there so much connection in so much diversity. And above that all, the human mind’s ability to understand it all!

This all seems to emerge out from the human mind’s universality which it is predisposed of. And this ‘universality’ depicts that somewhere out there, there is an agent that causes such a ‘universality’ to be contrived and rationalised into a single brain-aided mind — and the belief in that agent is religion!

Published in The Express Tribune, August 7^th, 2021.

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