The Scientific Acknowledgement of the Transcendent

What is real?

Many scientists today chuckle at the beliefs of prior generations and pious people around the world: beliefs in the existence of God, angels, the spiritual soul, life after death, and immaterial reality as a whole. The objects of these beliefs are a priori taken to be unreal, and they therefore bristle at its ubiquity across time and space and its popularity even in this very advanced age. But is this not backwards science? An honest inquiry must begin with the fact. Human beings experience the immaterial and the transcendent. This fact is independent of whether what they experience is real, which is a word whose meaning we now have to explore.

A person experiences God calling him to a certain action through an inner prompting. Afterwards, he doubts whether the call was real or not. Notice that the call itself was immaterial by its very nature. People who uncritically mock religious experience fail to note this crucial point. The ordinary religious person does not claim to hear an audible voice in prayer everyday, though he hears a voice nonetheless. It is an immatierial voice, a “voice” in an analogous sense. In asking whether the call was real or not, he is not asking whether he is suffering from vivid hallucinations. Rather, he seeks to know whether or not he should trust the interior voice and whether it was really God who was calling him. Either way, he experienced something. This is the fact. The interpretation of the fact is up in the air, but the fact has its feet on the ground.

Could this calling, the fact, have been real? Let us begin with the viewpoint of materialists and work our way from there. Perhaps only that which is sensible by us and others is real. There are, however, unsensible things, such as UV radiation, that affect the sensible world, and it seems right that we should extend the privilege of being real to them as well. It might be argued that UV radiation too is sensible, just in a different or indirect way. To simplify matters, let us assume that we had superhuman senses that could see UV rays, feel magnetic forces, and in general sense every kind of matter and energy in the universe. Then, could we conclude that reality was identical with the sensible? The conception of reality would still seem too narrow. We also have the laws of physics, such as the conservation of momentum or entropy, which are unsensible in principle. Even more, the quantum wave function that describes the probability of finding a particle somewhere is undoubtedly real and yet elusive. Unlike a sound wave, it does not travel through any medium, and unlike an electromagnetic wave, it is not a wave of any kind of energy – just sheer probability. This wave function could not be detected even by superhuman senses, and yet it affects everything. It seems that at best we can say that something is real if it has measurable effects.

The idea that “something is real if it has measurable effects” seems like a good candidate for defining reality. The only problem is that the “if” serves merely to verify its being real and does not provide the basis or condition for its being real. It is like saying, “A celestial body is a star if it twinkles.” This statement means, “I know a celestial body is a star if I see it twinkle.” However, the more precise statement would be, “A celestial body twinkles because it is a star,” which is the reverse of the earlier statement. When we carry this logic over to the original statement, “Something is real if it has measurable effects,” we see that the better statement would be, “Something has measurable effects because it is real.” Of course, this tells us nothing about what makes something real but it does tell us something about measurable effects and where they come from. Any measurable phenonemon in the cosmos emanates from something real. All measurable effects have a real cause.

The fact of the experience has had measurable effects upon this man and so must have a “real” cause. But this is of course not what the man is asking about when he questions whether it was real.

Was it real? = Was it transcendent?

An authentic experience of being called by God does not carry with it the character of materiality or at least of being limited to materiality. This is true in general with transcendent experience and is perhaps even its very definition. It can be seen clearly, for example, in the transcendent experience of love. Even when biochemical explanations are provided for love, it does not adequately explain the phenomenon. Evolutionary theories fail to explain why a lover would die for the beloved, which cannot be a successful evolutionary strategy, even though it belongs to the very essence of love. Whenever attempts are made to reduce transcendent experience to material causes, the resulting incongruity becomes almost comical.¹ In the attempts to explain love through material causes, they first redefine love as being something fundamentally material and then celebrate having arrived at its total explanation. We are more interested in the original, non-ideologically contaminated primitives of human experience, the bases from which science is formed and the final test of its validity. Therefore, we simply and humbly acknowledge that love is real just like we acknowledge that there are three dimensions of space.

The person in love knows that love is real. The critical question is whether this love is real or, in other words, whether this is really love, as opposed to some counterfeit. What makes for a counterfeit love? Presumably, it is its lack of transcendence. If a woman is trying to decide whether to marry a man and becomes keenly aware through self-reflection and the aid of her trusted friends that she is being driven almost entirely by physical and emotional forces, she should proceed with caution. This caution is like a scientific discovery but which comes from the age-old study of human experience. Though not found in textbooks, it is passed down through countless stories and validated by observation of the imprudent. She will question herself: “Is this truly love or merely attraction?” Put differently, “Is this the experience of the transcendent or merely biochemistry, classical conditioning, etc?” The same question appears in the case of religious experiences. If the person finds material causes that wholly or mostly explain the phenomenon, they exercise caution. None of this is to say that material causes are bad. Rather, the wisdom of the millennia and of personal life experiences convince man that material causes can be fickle, whereas transcendent causes are steady and edifying over time.

When science looks at the transcendent

All scientific knowledge is the organization and abstraction of the phenomenal world. To test this, work backwards from any scientific theory. Take special relativity, for example, which is Einstein’s theory that explains how time dilates and lengths contract at high velocities. This was a brilliant theory that was a direct result of observing the phenomenon of light’s speed. The Fizeau experiment in 1851 puzzled physicists because it showed that light did not speed up as much as expected when it was sent through water moving in the same direction. They expected the speed to be the speed of light (in water) + the speed of the water, just like how your speed increases when you run onto a moving walk-way – your speed + the speed of the walkway. Instead, Fizeau observed it to be the speed of light (in water) + only a fraction of the speed of the water. This is what the phenomenal world, the world of our experiences, told us about itself. Scientists must accept this world as is and then try to find its patterns, its laws, its interconnections, and its structure. Every single scientific theory ultimately comes from phenomena and then is validated against phenomena for the purpose of making sense of phenomena.

Scientists may take issue with acknowledging the reality of transcendent experience like hearing the voice of God because it is not material, but we have already indicated that this is not an adequate criterion. We cannot arbitrarily decide which phenomena can be looked at and which cannot. Transcendent experience belongs to the phenomenal world universally. Moreover, to say that it has measurable effects would be an understatement. Religious experiences and immaterial realities have shaped most of human history, which is to say, they have had measurable effects upon human beings and have contributed substantially to the development of our present social context. Since all measurable effects have a real cause, the reality of this cause cannot be in question. It is a primitive fact. Can science acknowledge this fact?

Falsifying transcendence

Modern science distinguishes itself in part by its falsifiability. This is a praiseworthy discipline because it purifies intellectual activity of self-referentiality and arbitrary speculation. For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable in principle, which roughly means that there is some practical way to attempt to disprove it. Falsification has nothing to do with arguments, which can go on ad infinitum in all directions. Rather, the falsifier must violate one of the theory’s necessary predictions or effects. For example, I could invalidate Einstein’s theory of special relativity by having a single photon travel faster than 299,792.458 km/s. Or I could disprove macro evolutionary theories if I found a single primate fossil that was 1 billion years old. In our case, we must see whether the claim or theory that human beings encounter transcendent reality is falsifiable.

Transcendent experience is in fact very easily falsifiable. If a transcendent experience could be entirely reproduced in a psychologically healthy person by a material cause, it would prove that such an experience is not transcendent. If a drug could produce the same phenomena that prayerful people experience in prayer, it would prove that the experience of prayer is not transcendent (i.e. it is completely, materially explanable). It turns out that this is not easy to do in practice and not just with religious experience. The interior experience of consciousness is very difficult to reduce to physical causality, as even nonreligious thinkers like David Chalmers acknowledge.

We now have a pretty good idea of how a physical system can have psychological properties: the psychological mind–body problem has been dissolved. What remains is the question of why and how these psychological properties are accompanied by phenomenal properties: why all the stimulation and reaction associated with pain is accompanied by the experience of pain, for instance.²

This means that the realm of transcendence is both falsifiable and not falsified. It is just like any other scientific theory.

How far can science go?

As Chalmers suggests, with our understanding of neural networks and how even complex behaviors can be trained (see Can AI think?, the connection between matter and behavior seems rather well-elucidated. And yet, as far as we have advanced in this respect, we cannot explain the inherent subjectivity of being human. All the thoughts and behaviors that proceed mechanically from the interconnections of our 86 billion neurons are somehow at the service of a subject (a someone) that transcends them. This suggests that, even apart from the examples we listed (love and God), transcendence over materiality is an ordinary and inescapable aspect of being human. It is not a special characteristic of rare experiences but belongs in varying degrees to every experience.

If, in every experience, there is some element of transcendence (because the subject of the experience is transcendent), there should be ample, transcendent subject-matter for scientists to study. What prevents them? We have shown its falsifiability, after all. Recall that we have only shown the falsifiability of the fact of transcendent experiences (i.e. that they are real). Transcendent reality is as much a fact as time or light, but this does not mean that science can explore their contents as it does the properties of time or light. (A topic for a future essay.) What can be expected and even demanded is a mutual nod, an acknowledgment of each other that neither encroaches upon nor dismisses their respective domains.

One of the greatest scientists of the last century, who may even be called the creator of quantum mechanics³, said it beautifully:

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

• Werner Heisenberg

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1. Contorting the phenomenon of ‘dying for one’s beloved’ to ‘genetically disposed to ensure success of the offspring’ would be an example of a comical explanation. Anyone in love knows it has nothing to do with whether the beloved has children or not! Reduction to material causes is simply not possible. Note that “material cause” in this essay does not refer to the Aristotelian notion but precisely to “matter or energy”. ↩

2. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 25. ↩

3. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1932/heisenberg/facts/ ↩