EMMA HEALY on faith, science, and why the two were never really in competition
There are certain things I find hard to explain, because to me they seem obvious before I’ve even found the words for them. I’ll read an explanation of a scientific theory, or a mathematical principle, or some idea from psychology or economics, and think: yes, of course. Not because I knew the terminology, or because I’d done any of the work required to prove it. Just because the thing being described already made sense to me instinctively, somewhere underneath the technicalities. Working something out and understanding it, I’ve come to think, aren’t quite the same thing.
We’re very good at rewarding the first kind of intelligence. Solve a difficult maths problem, or make sense of a complicated piece of engineering, and people will call you clever, probably rightly.
What I sometimes find curious is why we often view one particular form of intelligence to become almost synonymous with intelligence itself.
Numbers are information, but so are words, so is music. History has patterns, and a sequence to it, and so do people. Understanding sometimes comes from calculating those patterns, and sometimes simply from seeing them. My own instinct is nearly always to begin with the second.
Widen that thought slightly and something stranger comes into view. It is a peculiar fact that the universe is comprehensible at all. Human minds can uncover mathematical relationships that correspond to physical reality, spot patterns in nature, turn them into equations, and then use those equations to predict things that have not happened yet. The interesting question is not really how clever human beings are. It is why reality should be structured in such a way that a human mind is capable of understanding it in the first place.
Which is partly why I find DNA so fascinating. I’m interested in the science, but before I get near any of the detail, I’m stopped by the bigger, stranger fact underneath it: life runs on information. A person starts out as a set of instructions, which get copied and inherited and altered and switched on and off, until eventually there’s someone standing there capable of turning around and wondering how any of that happened. We can name every process and describe the sequence in which things unfold, and all of that knowledge is genuinely valuable, yet none of it makes the underlying fact seem ordinary to me. If anything, the more thoroughly it gets explained, the stranger it becomes, because at some point matter has organised itself into a mind capable of asking what matter is.
In some ways, the more we explain it, the stranger it becomes.
I think this is part of why I have never understood the idea that science must somehow diminish belief in God. I believe in God, and discovering another mechanism through which life or the universe operates has never seemed to me like evidence against that belief. Knowing how something happens and knowing what ultimately lies behind it are not always the same question. If someone explains exactly how a thing happens, they have not necessarily answered why there is a reality in which
it can happen at all, which is a different sort of question, and one that a complete mechanical explanation would not settle either way.
And perhaps consciousness is where this becomes most interesting to me, because the mind is the thing doing all of the observing in the first place. We use it to study matter, to construct scientific theories, to understand mathematics and to investigate the brain itself, yet consciousness remains the point from which every one of those investigations begins.
I suspect we understand a lot less about the mind, and about how it relates to the body, than we will one day. I’m drawn, too, to the idea that it might not be as neatly contained inside individual heads as we assume. Something like collective consciousness makes intuitive sense to me — not as some mystical fog hanging over everyone, but because people are constantly passing information to each other in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes very hard to pin down. Someone believes something, that belief changes what they do, and what they do changes what happens to somebody else — until whatever started off invisibly inside one head has become something real in the world.
None of this, I should say plainly, amounts to ‘proof’, and no one can offer an equation that ends in God. What I’ve got is more like a conviction underneath the reasoning than one built by it, the same kind of instinct I started this piece with, the sort that recognises a pattern or sequence before it can explain it. I don’t think that’s a weakness, particularly. Most of what any of us actually believe, about people, about right and wrong, about what genuinely matters, was felt long before it was argued.
I sometimes wonder, too, whether science occasionally talks us out of things we already knew perfectly well. A mother senses something’s wrong with her child before any test says so. A room changes the second a certain person walks into it, and everyone feels it shift without being able to say why. A decision feels wrong before you can put your finger on the reason. We’re taught to wait for the explanation before we trust the feeling, and I’m honestly not sure that’s the right way round. Sometimes the explanation just turns up later to give a name to something we’d already worked out for ourselves.
None of this is an argument against science… science is one of the most remarkable things human beings do. It takes intuition, observation and curiosity and submits them to discipline, and that discipline is precisely what allows us to tell the difference between something that merely feels true and something that actually behaves consistently in the physical world. My disagreement, if I have one, is not with science but with the assumption that if something cannot currently be measured, it either does not exist or is not worth taking seriously.
We tend to assume that the more science explains, the less mystery is left standing. My experience has been closer to the opposite. The more ordered and intelligible everything turns out to be, the more interesting the question of what’s behind that order becomes. I started this by saying some things seem obvious to me before I’ve found the language for them. God is the largest example I’ve got.
I don’t have proof of God. But in many ways, in the natural world and elsewhere, I see a world where pattern and sequence turn up everywhere, and I refuse to believe that’s an accident. Understanding the mechanism has never removed God from the picture for me. More often than not, it’s precisely the mechanism that makes me think of Him.
