In my 20s, I had a friend who was brilliant, charming, Ivy-educated and
rich, heir to a family fortune. I’ll call him Gallagher. He could do
anything he wanted. He experimented, dabbling in neuroscience, law,
philosophy and other fields. But he was so critical, so picky, that he never
settled on a career. Nothing was good enough for him. He never found love
for the same reason. He also disparaged his friends’ choices, so much so
that he alienated us. He ended up bitter and alone. At least that’s my
guess. I haven’t spoken to Gallagher in decades.
There is such a thing as being too picky, especially when it comes to things
like work, love and nourishment (even the pickiest eater has to eat
something). That’s the lesson I gleaned from Gallagher. But when it comes to
answers to big mysteries, most of us aren’t picky enough. We settle on
answers for bad reasons, for example, because our parents, priests or
professors believe it. We think we need to believe something, but actually
we don’t. We can, and should, decide that no answers are good enough. We
should be agnostics.
Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take
Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health.
He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died
for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of
God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told
him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”
Collins apologized. “That was a put-down that should not apply to earnest
agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don’t find an answer,”
he said. “I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific
community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the
evidence.” I have examined the evidence for Christianity, and I find it
unconvincing. I’m not convinced by any scientific creation stories, either,
such as those that depict our cosmos as a bubble in an oceanic “multiverse.”
People I admire fault me for being too skeptical. One is the late religious
philosopher Huston Smith, who called me “convictionally impaired.” Another
is megapundit Robert Wright, an old friend, with whom I’ve often argued
about evolutionary psychology and Buddhism. Wright once asked me in
exasperation, “Don’t you believe anything?” Actually, I believe lots of
things, for example, that war is bad and should be abolished.
But when it comes to theories about ultimate reality, I’m with Voltaire.
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Voltaire said, “but certainty is an
absurd one.” Doubt protects us from dogmatism, which can easily morph into
fanaticism and what William James calls a “premature closing of our accounts
with reality.” Below I defend agnosticism as a stance toward the existence
of God, interpretations of quantum mechanics and theories of consciousness.
When considering alleged answers to these three riddles, we should be as
picky as my old friend Gallagher.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Why do we exist? The answer, according to the major monotheistic religions,
including the Catholic faith in which I was raised, is that an all-powerful,
supernatural entity created us. This deity loves us, as a human father loves
his children, and wants us to behave in a certain way. If we’re good, He’ll
reward us. If we’re bad, He’ll punish us. (I use the pronoun “He” because
most scriptures describe God as male.)
My main objection to this explanation of reality is the problem of evil. A
casual glance at human history, and at the world today, reveals enormous
suffering and injustice. If God loves us and is omnipotent, why is life so
horrific for so many people? A standard response to this question is that
God gave us free will; we can choose to be bad as well as good.
The late, great physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist, who died in July,
slaps down the free will argument in his book Dreams of a Final Theory.
Noting that Nazis killed many of his relatives in the Holocaust, Weinberg
asks: Did millions of Jews have to die so the Nazis could exercise their
free will? That doesn’t seem fair. And what about kids who get cancer? Are
we supposed to think that cancer cells have free will?
On the other hand, life isn’t always hellish. We experience love,
friendship, adventure and heartbreaking beauty. Could all this really come
from random collisions of particles? Even Weinberg concedes that life
sometimes seems “more beautiful than strictly necessary.” If the problem of
evil prevents me from believing in a loving God, then the problem of beauty
keeps me from being an atheist like Weinberg. Hence, agnosticism.
THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION
Quantum mechanics is science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality. It
has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The
trouble is, physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that
is, what it says about how the world works. Many physicists—most,
probably—adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation, advanced by Danish
physicist Niels Bohr. But that is a kind of anti-interpretation, which says
physicists should not try to make sense of quantum mechanics; they should
“shut up and calculate,” as physicist David Mermin once put it.
Philosopher Tim Maudlin deplores this situation. In his 2019 book Philosophy
of Physics: Quantum Theory, he points out that several interpretations of
quantum mechanics describe in detail how the world works. These include the
GRW model proposed by Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber; the pilot-wave theory of
David Bohm; and the many-worlds hypothesis of Hugh Everett. But here’s the
irony: Maudlin is so scrupulous in pointing out the flaws of these
interpretations that he reinforces my skepticism. They all seem hopelessly
kludgy and preposterous.
Maudlin does not examine interpretations that recast quantum mechanics as a
theory about information. For positive perspectives on information-based
interpretations, check out Beyond Weird by journalist Philip Ball and The
Ascent of Information by astrobiologist Caleb Scharf. But to my mind,
information-based takes on quantum mechanics are even less plausible than
the interpretations that Maudlin scrutinizes. The concept of information
makes no sense without conscious beings to send, receive and act upon the
information.
Introducing consciousness into physics undermines its claim to objectivity.
Moreover, as far as we know, consciousness arises only in certain organisms
that have existed for a brief period here on Earth. So how can quantum
mechanics, if it’s a theory of information rather than matter and energy,
apply to the entire cosmos since the big bang? Information-based theories of
physics seem like a throwback to geocentrism, which assumed the universe
revolves around us. Given the problems with all interpretations of quantum
mechanics, agnosticism, again, strikes me as a sensible stance.
MIND-BODY PROBLEMS
The debate over consciousness is even more fractious than the debate over
quantum mechanics. How does matter make a mind? A few decades ago, a
consensus seemed to be emerging. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his cockily
titled Consciousness Explained, asserted that consciousness clearly emerges
from neural processes, such as electrochemical pulses in the brain. Francis
Crick and Christof Koch proposed that consciousness is generated by networks
of neurons oscillating in synchrony.
Gradually, this consensus collapsed, as empirical evidence for neural
theories of consciousness failed to materialize. As I point out in my recent
book Mind-Body Problems, there are now a dizzying variety of theories of
consciousness. Christof Koch has thrown his weight behind integrated
information theory, which holds that consciousness might be a property of
all matter, not just brains. This theory suffers from the same problems as
information-based theories of quantum mechanics. Theorists such as Roger
Penrose, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, have conjectured that
quantum effects underpin consciousness, but this theory is even more lacking
in evidence than integrated information theory.
Researchers cannot even agree on what form a theory of consciousness should
take. Should it be a philosophical treatise? A purely mathematical model? A
gigantic algorithm, perhaps based on Bayesian computation? Should it borrow
concepts from Buddhism, such as anatta, the doctrine of no self? All of the
above? None of the above? Consensus seems farther away than ever. And that’s
a good thing. We should be open-minded about our minds.
So, what’s the difference, if any, between me and Gallagher, my former
friend? I like to think it’s a matter of style. Gallagher scorned the
choices of others. He resembled one of those mean-spirited atheists who
revile the faithful for their beliefs. I try not to be dogmatic in my
disbelief, and to be sympathetic toward those who, like Francis Collins,
have found answers that work for them. Also, I get a kick out of inventive
theories of everything, such as John Wheeler’s “it from bit” and Freeman
Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity, even if I can’t embrace them.
I’m definitely a skeptic. I doubt we’ll ever know whether God exists, what
quantum mechanics means, how matter makes mind. These three puzzles, I
suspect, are different aspects of a single, impenetrable mystery at the
heart of things. But one of the pleasures of agnosticism—perhaps the
greatest pleasure—is that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a
revelation awaits just over the horizon.
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