The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

“IN MUCH the same way as prophets and seers and great theologians seem to have died out,” Christopher Hitchens has claimed in God Is Not Great, “so the age of miracles seems to lie somewhere in our past.”

Have they? Does it?

I would have thought that Einstein, Bohr, Gödel, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and even Richard Feynman were all in their own way prophets and seers.

Apparently not.

But miracles? The word seems to engender its own current of contempt. If one demands of a miracle that it violates the inviolable, there could be no miracles. It follows that there are none. Somehow this seems rather too easy a victory to afford even Christopher Hitchens a sense of satisfaction. No one is much concerned to debate the proposition that what could not be cannot be. Nor is it particularly invigorating to designate as a miracle an unexpected turn of events favoring oneself, as when a diagnosis proves benign or a divorce final. A miracle is what it seems: an event offering access to the divine. And if this is what miracles are, whether they are seen will, of course, always be contingent on who is looking. The miracles of religious tradition are historical. They reflect the power the ancient Hebrews brought to bear on their experiences. They did what they could. They saw what they could see. But we have other powers. We are the heirs to a magnificent scientific tradition. We can see farther than men whose horizons were bounded by the burning desert.

In a remark now famous, Richard Feynman observed with respect to quantum electrodynamics that its control over the natural world is so accurate that in measuring the distance from New York to Los Angeles, theory and experiment would diverge by less than the width of a human hair. Einstein’s theory of general relativity is in some respects equally accurate. We cannot account for these unearthly results. The laws of nature neither explain themselves nor predict their success. We have no reason to expect such gifts, and if we have come to expect them, this is only because, as the saints have always warned, we expect far more than we deserve.

GOD OF THE GAPS

Scientific atheism is not an undertaking that has cherished rhetorical inventiveness. It has one brilliant insult to its credit, and that is the description of intelligent design as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” I do not know who coined the phrase, but whoever it was, chapeau. By the same token, it has only one stock character in repertoire, and that is the God of the Gaps. Unlike the God of Old, who ruled irritably over everything, the God of the Gaps rules over gaps in argument or evidence. He is a presiding God, to be sure, but one with limited administrative functions. With gaps in view, He undertakes his very specialized activity of incarnating Himself as a stopgap. If He is resentful at the limitations in scope afforded by His narrow specialization, He is, scientific atheists assume, grateful to have any work at all.

When the gaps are all filled, He will join Wotan in Valhalla.

As a rhetorical contrivance, the God of the Gaps makes his effect contingent on a specific assumption: that whatever the gaps, they will in the course of scientific research be filled. It is an assumption both intellectually primitive and morally abhorrent—primitive because it reflects a phlegmatic absence of curiosity, and abhorrent because it assigns to our intellectual future a degree of authority alien to human experience. Western science has proceeded by filling gaps, but in filling them, it has created gaps all over again. The process is inexhaustible. Einstein created the special theory of relativity to accommodate certain anomalies in the interpretation of Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field. Special relativity led directly to general relativity. But general relativity is inconsistent with quantum mechanics, the largest visions of the physical world alien to one another. Understanding has improved, but within the physical sciences, anomalies have grown great, and what is more, anomalies have grown great because understanding has improved.

The God of the Gaps? I am prepared with the best of them to revile and denounce him. It is easy enough to do just that, one reason that so many scientists are doing it. But why not say with equal authority that for all we know, it is the God of Old who continues to preside over the bent world with His accustomed fearful majesty, and that He has chosen to reveal Himself by drawing the curtain on His own magnificence at precisely the place in which general relativity and quantum mechanics should have met but do not touch? Whether gaps in the manifold of our understanding reveal nothing more than the God of the Gaps or nothing less than the God of Old is hardly a matter open to rational debate.

It is in this respect discouraging time and again to see the matter discharged in a peevish display of vanity. In considering the possibility that the facts of biology might suggest an intelligent designer, which surely they do, Emile Zuckerkandl has found it difficult to contain his indignation. Writing in the journal Gene, he overflowed into epithets: “The intellectual virus named ‘intelligent design.’ …This virus certainly is a problem in the country…. the ‘creationists’… have decided some years ago… to dress up in academic gear and to present themselves as scholars… laugh off this disguise. Their…erroneous beliefs are weighty reasons to keep them in check…. they try to foster on society… some enterprising superghost. Naïve members of the public… a comical invitation… the wrong foot—the only foot on which promoters of intelligent design can get around… peddled to the public. The minority of ‘intelligent designers’ who have any true interest in biology… The ‘intelligent designers’ ’ theme song… guided by a little angel… medieval in concept… an intellectually dangerous condition… the divine jumping disease…. humanity dug herself into ‘faiths’ like a blind leech into flesh and won’t let go…. Feeding like leeches on irrational beliefs… offensive little swarms of insects… must be taken care of by spraying biological knowledge….”

Darwinian biologists are very often persuaded that there is a conspiracy afoot to make them look foolish.

In this they are correct.

DULL, DUTIFUL, SO VERY DARWIN

There are times, I suspect, when even the most ardent among biologists suspects that enough is enough. The Old Boy is everywhere; he has long since ascended to the Pantheon; schoolchildren hymn his name, and while the man himself seems to have been sober, melancholy, and boring, his admirers have over the past twenty years or so succeeded in suggesting that his effulgence was such that had he been embedded in the ocean floor, sailors might for centuries unerringly navigate by his luster. If Richard Dawkins has not yet proposed renaming various English banknotes in Darwin’s favor, this is only because of late he has been too busy counting them.

Enough is enough.

The effort by Darwinian biologists to promote Darwin is simply explained. Within the English-speaking world, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You’ve got to be kidding, right? There is wide appreciation of the fact that if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they are wrong about everything.

Mindful of what is at stake—everything—biologists resemble the war horses mentioned in Job 39:19–25: “He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.” If they cannot fight the battles at hand, they are eager to refight the battles they have won. For Eugenie Scott, Paul Gross, Barbara Forrest, Robert Pennock, or Lawrence Krauss, it is yet 1925. John Scopes is in the dock. Clarence Darrow is at his side. And in the small towns where the prairie winds blow, the forces of right thinking are still occupied in doing battle for men’s souls.

Suspicions about Darwin’s theory arise for two reasons. The first: the theory makes little sense. The second: it is supported by little evidence. In his very long posthumous treatise, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen Jay Gould explained “the bare bones” of natural selection in this way: “Organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments.” Those variants that are “better adapted” are, of course, precisely those “enjoying differential reproductive success.” What else could they be? Biologists believe that tautologies play an unsuspected role in scientific thought and are for this reason worthy of respect. Of course they do.

As one might expect, a theory whose assumptions are empty may be widely confirmed by evidence whose relevance is negligible. Just how and when do species arise? The standard view throughout much of the twentieth century has been that geographical barriers, such as a mountain range or an open body of water, are necessary to force an ancestral population to diverge.

In a study reported in the November 20, 2007, edition of Science Daily, Vicki Friesen, a professor of biology, observed: “While that model fits for many parts of the natural world, it doesn’t explain why some species appear to have evolved separately, within the same location, where there are no geographic barriers to gene flow.” And, indeed, some species have evolved separately within the same location. Friesen’s own research indicated that the band-rumped storm petrel shares its nesting sites in sequence with other petrels. This result conflicts with the standard view. In Origins, Darwin himself argued for just this possibility.

I have every confidence in Dr. Friesen’s research and no way in which to dispute it. I am not about to investigate the band-rumped storm petrel. It is her conclusion that must give pause. It is “exciting,” she affirms, “to be able to verify Darwin’s original theory!”

But no theory has been confirmed since every possibility has been justified. Speciation proceeds in the presence of geographic barriers, and it proceeds in their absence. The demand that the facts somehow support the theory may thus be treated as it so often is in Darwinian thought, and that is as an inconvenience.

If the facts are what they are, the past is what it is—profoundly enigmatic. The fossil record may be used to justify virtually any position, and often is. There are long eras in which nothing happens. The fire alarms of change then go off in the night. A detailed and continuous record of transition between species is missing, those neat sedimentary layers, as Gould noted time and again, never revealing precisely the phenomena that Darwin proposed to explain. It is hardly a matter on which paleontologists have been reticent. At the very beginning of his treatise Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, Robert Carroll observes quite correctly that “most of the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic account” of evolution. A “strictly gradualistic” account is precisely what Darwin’s theory demands: It is the heart and soul of the theory.

But by the same token, there are no laboratory demonstrations of speciation either, millions of fruit flies coming and going while never once suggesting that they were destined to appear as anything other than fruit flies. This is the conclusion suggested as well by more than six thousand years of artificial selection, the practice of barnyard and backyard alike. Nothing can induce a chicken to lay a square egg or to persuade a pig to develop wheels mounted on ball bearings. It would be a violation, as chickens and pigs are prompt to observe and often with indignation, of their essential nature. If species have an essential nature that beyond limits cannot change, then random variations and natural selection cannot change them. We must look elsewhere for an account that does justice to their nature or to the facts.

Although Darwin depicted natural selection as a force “daily and hourly scrutinizing” the biological world—a description that would equally designate the activities of the Holy Ghost—efforts to measure natural selection have been remarkably unforthcoming. In a research survey published in 2001, and widely ignored thereafter, the evolutionary biologist Joel Kingsolver reported that in sample sizes of more than one thousand individuals, there was virtually no correlation between specific biological traits and either reproductive success or survival. “Important issues about selection,” he remarked with some understatement, “remain unresolved.”

Of those important issues, I would mention prominently the question whether natural selection exists at all.

Computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not. Thomas Ray has for years been conducting computer experiments in an artificial environment that he has designated Tierra. Within this world, a shifting population of computer organisms meet, mate, mutate, and reproduce.

Sandra Blakeslee, writing for the New York Times, reported the results under the headline “Computer ‘Life Form’ Mutates in an Evolution Experiment: Natural Selection Is Found at Work in a Digital World.”

Natural selection found at work? I suppose so, for as Blakeslee observes with solemn incomprehension, “the creatures mutated but showed only modest increases in complexity.” Which is to say, they showed nothing of interest at all. This is natural selection at work, but it is hardly work that has worked to intended effect.

What these computer experiments do reveal is a principle far more penetrating than any that Darwin ever offered:

There is a sucker born every minute.

If Darwin’s theory of evolution has little to contribute to the content of the sciences, it has much to offer their ideology. It serves as the creation myth of our time, assigning properties to nature previously assigned to God. It thus demands an especially ardent form of advocacy. In this regard, Daniel Dennett, like Mexican food, does not fail to come up long after he has gone down. “Contemporary biology,” he writes, “has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that natural selection—the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge—has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs” (italics added).

These remarks are typical in their self-enchanted self-confidence. Nothing in the physical sciences, it goes without saying—right?—has been demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt. The phrase belongs to a court of law. The thesis that improvements in life appear automatically represents nothing more than Dennett’s conviction that living systems are like elevators: If their buttons are pushed, they go up. Or down, as the case may be. Although Darwin’s theory is very often compared favorably to the great theories of mathematical physics on the grounds that evolution is as well established as gravity, very few physicists have been heard observing that gravity is as well established as evolution. They know better and they are not stupid.

I mention these obvious points not in order once again to abuse poor Dennett, an activity that I never weary of undertaking, but to make a point of my own. The greater part of the debate over Darwin’s theory is not in service to the facts. Nor to the theory. The facts are what they have always been: They are unforthcoming. And the theory is what it always was: It is unpersuasive. Among evolutionary biologists, these matters are well known. In the privacy of the Susan B. Anthony faculty lounge, they often tell one another with relief that it is a very good thing the public has no idea what the research literature really suggests.

“Darwin?” a Nobel laureate in biology once remarked to me over his bifocals. “That’s just the party line.”

WHAT BIOLOGISTS TALK ABOUT WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT LIFE

In the summer of 2007, Eugene Koonin, of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, published a paper entitled “The Biological Big Bang Model for the Major Transitions in Evolution.”

The paper is refreshing in its candor; it is alarming in its consequences. “Major transitions in biological evolution,” Koonin writes, “show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity” (italics added).

Major transitions in biological evolution? These are precisely the transitions that Darwin’s theory was intended to explain. If those “major transitions” represent a “sudden emergence of new forms,” the obvious conclusion to draw is not that nature is perverse but that Darwin was wrong.

“The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities,” Koonin goes on to say, “are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.” The facts that fall outside the margins of Darwin’s theory include “the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla.”

That is, pretty much everything.

Koonin is hardly finished. He has just started to warm up. “In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history,” he goes on to say, “the principal ‘types’ seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate ‘grades’ or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”

The phrase intermediate forms has a particular poignancy in context. It has been by an appeal to those intermediate forms that a very considerable ideology has been created. To doubt their existence is to stand self-accused. To go further and suggest that they are, in fact, imaginary evokes a frenzy of fearful contempt so considerable as to make civilized discourse impossible.

Koonin’s views do not represent the views of the Darwinian establishment. If they did, there would be no Darwinian establishment. They are not uncontested. And it may well be that they are exaggerated. Koonin is nonetheless both a serious biologist and a man not well known for a disposition to self-immolation.

And in a much more significant sense, his views are simply part of a much more serious pattern of intellectual discontent with Darwinian doctrine. Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the Japanese mathematical biologist Motoo Kimura argued that on the genetic level—the place where mutations take place—most changes are selectively neutral. They do nothing to help an organism survive; they may even be deleterious. A competent mathematician and a fastidious English prose stylist, Kimura was perfectly aware that he was advancing a powerful argument against Darwin’s theory of natural selection. “The neutral theory asserts,” he wrote in the introduction to his masterpiece, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, “that the great majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level, as revealed by comparative studies of protein and DNA sequences, are caused not by Darwinian selection but by random drift of selectively neutral or nearly neutral mutations” (italics added).

This is radical doctrine. Waves of probability ebb and flow throughout the molecular structure of a living organism. Invisible to the scrutinizing force of natural selection, mutations drift through the currents of time. Whether a mutation is fixed within a population or whether it is simply washed away is a matter of chance.

The neutral theory of molecular evolution was never destined to achieve wide favor among Darwinian biologists. Kimura’s treatise is framed as a powerful but difficult mathematical argument. But population geneticists understood its importance, even if they disagreed in some of its details. To the extent that the neutral theory is true, Darwin’s theory is not.

This has prompted at least certain population geneticists to deplore in print the sheer effrontery that is so conspicuous a feature of the popular literature devoted to Darwin’s theory. Richard Dawkins has appeared as tempting a squab within the tent of population genetics as he has long seemed without. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch observed that “Dawkins’s agenda has been to spread the word on the awesome power of natural selection.” The view that results, Lynch remarks, is incomplete and therefore “profoundly misleading.” Lest there be any question about Lynch’s critique, he makes the point explicitly: “What is in question is whether natural selection is a necessary or sufficient force to explain the emergence of the genomic and cellular features central to the building of complex organisms.”

But if it is quite possible that natural selection is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the complexity of living systems, then it is also possible that it is of no relevance to living systems whatsoever.

The demotion of natural selection from biological superpower to ideological sad sack throws into bright relief an obvious question: How to explain on the basis of a random walk the startling coherence and complexity of living organisms? If the question is obvious, so, too, is its answer: We have no idea. “The general foundations for the evolution of ‘higher’ from ‘lower’ organisms,” Emile Zuckerkandl has written, “seems so far to have largely eluded analysis” (italics added).

This is surely true. But the phrase eluded analysis conveys a current of intellectual optimism at odds with the facts. Something that has so far eluded analysis can hardly be assigned to a force that has so far eluded demonstration. It is in this context that Daniel Dennett’s assertion that natural selection has been demonstrated “beyond all reasonable doubt” must be judged for what it is: It is the ecclesiastical bull of a most peculiar church, a cousin in kind to an ecclesiastical bluff. When Steven Pinker affirms that “natural selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve,” he is very much in the inadvertent position of the apostles. Much against his will, he is bearing witness.

In all this, it is the reaction among the faithful that provokes no surprise. Within minutes of the publication of Koonin’s paper, a call for censorship went up over the Internet. “Well,” one solemn donkey wrote, “since it is clear that this paper will be on every ID/creationist blog on the planet in under 12 hours, I might as well put in my 2 cents early.”

He might as well. And those two cents? What did they amount to?

One cent was devoted to a counsel of caution: “I think Koonin should give a little credit where credit is due to gradual, stepwise evolution.”

The second cent was spent on a cry of alarm: “Sometimes you’ve got to wonder how many hangovers (i.e., creationist quote-mining and general confusion over the status of evolution outside of the specialist community, and needless wrangling within the specialist community) could be avoided if scientists would exercise just a little caution during the party(i.e., spending a little time soberly comparing their revolutionary ideas with more prosaic explanations).”

The words if scientists would exercise just a little caution have a meaning all their own. They are written in code. They convey the need, apparently imperative, for biologists to keep bad news to themselves.

What is left is the “general confusion” that the public so often suffers when it comes to Darwin and Darwinism. On this matter, biologists are not at all confused. Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have “misled science into a dead end,” the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin’s paper, “we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against the creationists.”

It is hard to be less confused than that.

GREAT GAPS OF GOD

The God of the Gaps occupies a very considerable comfort zone in biology. He is right at home. We know better than we ever did that a great many aspects of biological behavior are innate. They arise in each organism. They are a part of its nature. This is certainly true of human beings. The point has been made with great force and plausibility by the linguist Noam Chomsky. Just as children are not taught to walk, they are not taught to speak. The environment serves only to trigger an innate maturational program. Human language is the very expression of human nature.

This is widely seen as offering dramatic confirmation of what Chomsky himself has called the “biological turn.” It is surely easy to see why. What is innate in an organism, so it is claimed, reflects its genetic endowment, and its genetic endowment reflects the long process in which random variations were sifted by a stern and unforgiving environment. If we are born with the ability to acquire a natural language, the gift lies within our genes and our genes lie within the shifting tides of time.

This view is so common that it is often forgotten that it is also incoherent. What is both interesting and innate in an organism cannot be explained in terms of its genetic endowment. If the concept of a gene is given any content at all—not a certainty by any means—it is entirely with the context of molecular biology and biochemistry. The gene is a chemical, a part of the molecule deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Its function is straightforward: It specifies the proteins needed by a living organism, and it species them by means of a remarkably complicated system of translation and transcription. To speak clearly of the genetic endowment of an organism is to speak only of the passage from one chemical structure to another—that and nothing more.

But to speak of the genetic endowment of an organism in terms that answer any interesting question about the organism is to go quite beyond the coordination of chemicals. It is to speak of what an organism does, how it reacts, what plans it makes, and how it executes them; it is to assign to a biological creature precisely the properties always assigned to such creatures: intention, desire, volition, need, passion, curiosity, despair, boredom, and rage.

These are not properties of a living system that can be easily seen as the consequences of any chemical reaction. It would be like suggesting that a tendency toward kleptomania follows the dissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen. This may well be so. Research is required. But if it is so, it represents a connection that we do not understand and cannot grasp. The gap is too great. When Richard Dawkins observes that genes “created us, body and mind” (emphasis added), he is appealing essentially to a magical connection. There is nothing in any precise concept of the gene that allows a set of biochemicals to create anything at all. If no precise concept of the gene is at issue, the idea that we are created by our genes, body and mind, represents a far less plausible thesis than the correlative doctrine that we are created by our Maker, body and mind.

“The more comprehensible the universe becomes,” Steven Weinberg has written, “the more it also seems pointless.” I suspect that Professor Weinberg is not actively called upon when victims of life’s injuries require solicitude. Beyond demanding that they deal with it, what could he say? This has struck many as an ungenerous attitude, and Weinberg has made every effort to cover his comment in confusion, chiefly by observing after the fact that he considers the universe a fine place, after all. If Weinberg’s power, prestige, and intellectual authority are not evidence in favor of the universe, then at least he can say that he has gotten from it a very good deal.

My sympathies are nonetheless with the old, sour, unregenerate Weinberg. He had a point. The arena of the elementary particles—his arena—is rather a depressing place, and if it resembles anything at all it rather resembles a fluorescent-lit bowling alley seen from the interstate, tiny stick figures in striped bowling shirts jerking up and down in the monstrously hot and humid night.

What is its point?

We seem to live our lives in perfect indifference to the Standard Model of particle physics, the world we inhabit not only remote from the world it describes but different in detail, thank God.

Over there, fields are pregnant with latent energy, particles flicker into existence and disappear, things are entangled, and no one can quite tell what is possible and what is actual, what is here and what is there, what is now and what was then. Solid forms give way. Nothing is stable. Great impassive symmetries are in control, as vacant and unchanging as the eye of Vishnu. Where they come from, no one knows. Time and space contract into some sort of agitated quantum foam. Nothing is continuous. Nothing stays the same for long, except the electrons, and they are identical, like porcelain Chinese soldiers. A pointless frenzy prevails throughout.

Over here, space and time are stable and continuous. Matter is what it is, and energy is what it does. There are solid and enduring shapes and forms. There are no controlling symmetries. The sun is largely the same sun now that it was four thousand years ago when it baked the Egyptian deserts. Changes appear slowly, but even when rapid, they appear in stable patterns. There is dazzling variety throughout. The great river of time flows forward. We anticipate the future, but we remember the past. We begin knowing we will end.

The God of the Gaps may now be invited to comment—strictly as an outside observer, of course. He is addressing us. And this is what He has to say: You have no idea whatsoever how the ordered physical, moral, mental, aesthetic, and social world in which you live could have ever arisen from the seething anarchy of the elementary particles.

It is like imagining sea foam resolving itself into the Parthenon.

And even though He is speaking strictly as an observer, perhaps He will be forgiven for asking of Christopher Hitchens, who has wandered into this discussion prepared to dispute anyone at the bar, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”

These examples may be multiplied at will. They form a common pattern, one in which a mystery is in evidence, but one demanding for its resolution intellectual insights that we do not possess and cannot honestly say we will in time command. No one has the faintest idea whether the immense gap between what is living and what is not may be crossed by any conceivable means. It is therefore no surprise that the National Academy of Sciences has taken pains to affirm that it has already been crossed. “For those who are studying aspects of the origin of life, the question no longer seems to be whether life could have originated by chemical processes involving non-biological components but, rather, what pathway might have been followed.” The view among biochemists actively engaged in research is different. “The de novo appearance of oligonucleotides on the primitive earth,” Gerald F. Joyce and Leslie Orgel remarked in their chapter of a volume entitled The RNA World, “would have been a near miracle.” Oligonucleotides are among the indispensable building blocks of living systems.

A near miracle is a term of art. It is like a near miss. And a miss, it should be recalled, is as good as a mile.

The theories that we have do what they can do, and then they stop. They do not stop because a detail is missing; they stop because we cannot go on. Difficulties are accommodated by the magician’s age-old tactic of misdirection.

Writing about the eye in On the Origin of Species, Darwin confessed that its emergence troubled him greatly. He was nonetheless able to resolve his own doubts in his favor, and ever since, biologists have assumed that inasmuch as Darwin proposed a solution, they need not face a problem. The solution that Darwin proposed and defended was simply to point to countlessly many examples of intermediate visual structures scattered throughout the animal kingdom. It formed an interesting argument. It did not touch the central issue. The eye is not simply a biological organ, although surely it is that. It is a biological organ that allows living creatures to see. If we cannot say what seeing comes to in physical or material terms, then we cannot say whether any theory is adequate to explain the appearance of an organ making sight possible.

This is precisely what we cannot say. The physical details are in part understood. Light strikes the eye in the form of photons but it exits the eye in terms of electrical signals. In between, bipolar cells convey visual information to ganglion cells, which in turn conduct information to the optic nerve. Thereafter the optic nerve conveys electrical signals to the brain. The brain in turn twitches into life, neurons firing here and there, the gooey mass for a moment convulsed.

And directly thereafter, I see the looming mass of Notre Dame, all gray stone and leering gargoyles, a long line of plodding tourists shuffling toward the door leading to the cathedral’s towers, the horses of the National Guard dropping their straw-filled waste in the center of the street as they clip-clop patiently toward their stables, the light, the hot haze, dust dancing in the air.

I open my eyes and my eyes are filled.

How do the twitching nerves, chemical exchanges, electrical flashes, and computational routines of the human eye and brain provide a human being with his experiences?

The gap opened between causal sequences that with a moving finger we can trace from one point to the next and the light-enraptured awareness to which they give rise is unfathomably large because it spans an incommensurable distance. The processes involved in sight are biological, chemical, and in the end physical. It may well be that at some point in the future, a physicist, using quantum electrodynamics perhaps, might be in a position to write down their equations. Whether such an equation will encompass our experiences—why, this is something we simply do not know.

“Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality,” Richard Feynman remarked in his lectures on turbulence. The remark has been widely quoted. It is honest.

The words that follow are rarely quoted. “We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.”

These words form an obvious inferential chain. If we do not know whether Schrödinger’s equation will one day accommodate our experience, we certainly do not know whether our experiences reflect anything less than a miracle.

For the moment, if asked to stand and declare ourselves on the most elementary aspects of the world in which we live—We see it—we can say nothing.

TIME, DEATH, LIFE, AND LONGING

For almost as long as the physical sciences have made their claims, poets and philosophers have observed that there is something inhuman about the undertaking they represent. They are right. We gain purchase on the physical world first by stripping it to its simplest form, and second by emptying it of its emotional content. Whatever the elementary particles may be doing, they are not forming political alliances, or looking on one another with mute incoherent longing, or casting an anxious eye on the clock, or waking with a start in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it all means, or coming to realize that they are destined to fall like the leaves of the trees leaving not a trace behind.

These are things we do: It is in our nature to do them. But how do we do them? By what means accessible to the imagination does a sterile and utterly insensate physical world become the garrulous, never-ending, infinitely varied, boisterous human world? The more the physical world is studied, and the richer our grasp of its principles, the greater the gap between what it represents and what we embody.

In 1948, Kurt Gödel provided a subtle argument for the thesis that time does not exist. In the course of providing a new solution of Einstein’s equations for general relativity, Gödel showed that the universe might be rotating in a void, turning serenely like a gigantic pinwheel. In a universe of this sort, each observer sees things as if he were at the center of the spinning, with the galaxies—indeed, the whole universe—rotating about him. As the galaxies rotate, they drag space and time with them, like propeller blades pulling water in their wake. A rotating universe turns space and time around in spirals. By moving in a large enough circle around an axis, at something approaching the speed of light, an observer might catch his own temporal tail, returning to his starting point at some time earlier than his departure.

If time moves in circles, and an observer can return to his own past, it seems to follow that effects might be their own causes.

Gödel recognized that rotating universes may be physically unrealistic, but they are possible, and once seen as possibilities, they cannot be unseen. Within these universes, time is an illusion. If time is an illusion in some universe, then features of time that we take for granted in our universe must be either accidents or gifts.

If time is an accident, it is inexplicable, and if a gift, it is unexpected. These conclusions, as Gödel remarked dryly, “can hardly be considered satisfactory.”

When, in 1948, Gödel first published his thoughts, the reaction was polite, but indifferent. Einstein appreciated his friend’s genius but thought his theories bizarre. But to read the literature of theoretical physics almost sixty years later is to be struck by the extent to which, at the far reaches of speculation, very similar ideas are reappearing, almost as if they were caught in one of those strange vortices that, in Gödel’s view, returned things to the past. Edward Witten and Alain Connes have both speculated that in the end, space and time might not have been there in the beginning. They are not necessary features of the physical world. When the deepest theories of physics are finally set out, perhaps centuries from now, they will not mention space and time. God knows if they will mention anything that we can understand.

We live by love and longing, death and the devastation that time imposes. How did they enter into the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.

We may allow ourselves in the early twenty-first century to neglect the Red Sea and to regard with unconcern the various loaves and fishes mentioned in the New Testament. We who are heirs to the scientific tradition have been given the priceless gift of a vastly enhanced sense of the miraculous. This is something that the very greatest scientists—Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Gödel—have always known and always stressed.

We are where human beings have always been, conveyed by miracles and yet unsure of the conveyance, unable to place our confidence completely in anything, or our doubt completely in everything.

When asked what he was in awe of, Christopher Hitchens responded that his definition of an educated person is that you have some idea how ignorant you are. This seems very much as if Hitchens were in awe of his own ignorance, in which case he has surely found an object worthy of his veneration.