I see my favorite thread is locked again. I need a vacation again
Some three hundred years ago in the early 1700s, in a small village in the Champagne region of France, there lived a humble Catholic priest who dutifully led mass, administered the sacraments, oversaw baptisms and funerals, and kindly tended to the existential needs of his flock. All the while, he secretly wrote an extensive tome castigating Catholicism, along with every other religion, as utter bullshit—or, in his words: “illusions, errors, lies, fictions, and impostures.”1 In an unprecedentedly searing take-down of religion, this good priest laid out extensive arguments against theism, deconstructed the logical fallacies of religious faith, and promulgated a soundly naturalistic and ethical worldview. This, of course, was dangerous stuff. Thus, knowing that his blasphemous ideas would inevitably lead to his torture and execution, he carefully hid his treatise but made specific arrangements for its publication after his death.
Jean Meslier
Jean Meslier was born in 1664 and died in 1729. Although barely known to even the most ardent secular aficionados—he was completely left out of such comprehensive works as Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, Sarah Bakewell’s Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Samuel Putnam’s 400 Years of Freethought, James Thrower’s Western Atheism, and Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers—Meslier was, arguably, the first secular humanist of Western culture to publish an extensive, thorough, and detailed articulation of atheism. Indeed, according to French scholar Michel Onfray, “true atheism” begins with Meslier. “For the first time,” Onfray writes, “a philosopher had dedicated a whole book to the question of atheism. He professed it, demonstrated it, arguing and quoting. … His title sets it out clearly: Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier, with the subtitle: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World.”2
As a young man, Meslier had begun studying theology under the tutelage of a local priest and then went on to join the seminary—mostly to please his parents. After all, it was a respectable and steady gig. But as his atheism blossomed throughout the course of his life, it certainly became a difficult career to uphold. As he wrote to his parishioners:
• "With respect to the false and fabulous mysteries of your religion and all the other pious but vain superstitious duties and obligations that your religion imposes on you … you could have easily noticed that I hardly devoted myself to the bigotry and I hardly thought much about maintaining you in it or of advising you to practice it. I was, nevertheless, obligated to teach you about your religion … and do the false duty that I committed myself to as priest of your parish. And ever since then I have had the displeasure of seeing myself in this annoying obligation of acting and speaking entirely against my own sentiments; I have had the displeasure of keeping you in the stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.”3
Being a priest—at least outwardly so—Meslier never married, but he did live with a woman who served as his maid. When Church authorities investigated this arrangement, he claimed that she was his niece. They didn’t buy it and punished him with a month of solitary confinement. Several years later, he was living with yet another “niece.” He also got into trouble with his bosses on another occasion for delivering a sermon in which he condemned a local lord for swindling the peasantry.4
Otherwise, Meslier’s life was unremarkable5: he lived simply and poorly. He wasn’t connected to any great movements, wasn’t part of any illustrious salons, or didn’t correspond with any beacons of the Enlightenment. He died knowing no fame. But the brilliant book he left behind was widely circulated in France. Voltaire paid a high price for a copy and published extracts from it in the 1760s. However, Voltaire “edited” Meslier’s work shamefully by chopping up the content to make Meslier out to be a deist in the same mold as Voltaire rather than the hardcore atheist that Meslier truly was. This act of Voltaire’s may be the main reason Meslier was so grossly sidelined from the cannon of European freethinking pioneers.
I first became aware of Meslier from reading Dale McGowan’s masterful Voices of Unbelief, whereby I learned that the first modern, complete English translation of Meslier’s work was only published (by Prometheus Books) in 2009 under the title Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier. Coming in at nearly 600 pages, and with whopping chapter titles such as “Weakness and Vanity of the Arguments the God-cultists Make to Prove the So-Called Spirituality and immortality of the Soul” and “If There Were Some Divinity Worshipped, and Served by Men, Would it Fail to Make Itself Sufficiently Known to Them and to Make Its Will Sufficiently Known to the Them?,” the book is certainly not the quickest or smoothest read. It is pedantic and repetitive. And, still, utterly brilliant.
Key Components
Meslier anticipates nearly every major argument against religion—and for atheism—that would go on to be trumpeted by the great freethinking luminaries of subsequent centuries, including our own. And he does so with clarity of thought, deliberate presentation, engaged attention to preexisting sources (such as the writings of Michel de Montaigne), extensive knowledge of the Bible, solid philosophical rigor, and careful rhetorical scaffolding throughout. And he did all this more or less on his own, because he was not in any active dialogue with other skeptics of his day.
To adequately summarize the multitude of arguments presented in his lengthy treatise is not possible here. But some highlights of this veritable atheist feast include:
The fallaciousness and inanity of Christianity. Meslier lays out prominent and obvious biblical contradictions, citing chapters and verses. He also argues that Jesus was a fool and a fanatic who purposely spoke obscurely and cryptically. And of course, the very legend is largely based on pagan inspiration, with the supposed miraculous details of his life amply anteceded in pagan religious myth and belief. It is a special atrocity of Christianity, Meslier argues, to make our natural inclinations sinful, and an absurdity to believe that a god can be offended or angered by our sins and then punish us for eternity in hell. Additionally, Christianity’s key doctrine of blood sacrifice is baffling, for it is
• "madness for our Christ-cultists to believe that the ‘God the Father’ wants to be appeased by men only through the punishment and death of his own divine son … monstrous was the inequity and madness in God the Father to want to be appeased by guilty men through the … bloody, cruel, and shameful death of his innocent and divine son. … I cannot find the words to express how crazy this is!"6
The god of the Bible is a moral monster. Meslier laments God is a monster who “deserves to be hated, detested, and cursed forever, seeing that [it] is crueler than all the cruelest tyrants who ever lived or could live.”7 But, of course, this whole matter of God’s supposed depraved character is moot because Meslier goes on to insist that God does not exist. There is no convincing evidence for such an imaginary being, and while we may not know or understand all the deep mysteries of being and existence, invoking “God” as some sort of explanation doesn’t help. And of course, even if there were an all-powerful deity, no one ever can agree on what this presumed God supposedly wills or wants. Different religions disagree in this matter, and even people within the very same religions disagree. Oh, and by the way, it is all too obvious that prayers don’t work.
All theology that prattles on about a deity that exists yet doesn’t possess any discernible qualities of existence is obtuse babble. “To speak in this way [of the inconceivable] is to speak without knowing what you are saying, to continue to multiply the absurdities and propose things that are more and more impossible, more and more inconceivable and absurd.”8
The “soul” as some separate entity does not exist. Rather, our minds and thoughts and feelings—even though they may feel like they come from an inner soul—all emerge from the physical, material processes of the brain: “what we call ‘our soul’ can be nothing else but a portion of the finest, subtlest, and most restless matter of our body.”9
Religious scriptures—and their meanings—are always subjectively interpreted and “depend only on the imagination of the interpreter.” If some want a passage to have allegorical or metaphorical meaning, then they give it such; if others want it to have literal meaning, same. And by such fallacious methods, “one could easily make everything true that was the most false and absurd.” 10
The vanity, hypocrisy, and wickedness of the clergy class. Priests, abbots, monks—all are vocations of wastefulness and uselessness:
• "The lowest of the worst jobs in a good republic are useful and necessary. Somebody has to do them … do not all parishes, for example, need shepherds and swineherds to guard the flocks? Do they not need wool-spinners and laundry women? We certainly need them everywhere; we cannot do without them. But what need is there in a republic for so many priests and monks and nuns who live in idleness and laziness? What need is there of all the pious sluggards whose occupations do nothing useful? Certainly there is no need and they are of no real use in the world.”11
Religion is a social construction with the content all being made up by people:“All the religions that exist or have existed in the world are and have always been nothing but human inventions … all the divinities that we worship are nothing but fabrications and inventions of men.”12 Furthermore, religion is a tool used by those in power to keep the poor and oppressed down. Religion creates castes and inequalities that subvert equal rights for all.
The superiority of empirical truth and reason over superstition and faith. Meslier is insistent that claims lacking evidence—especially miraculous, fantastical claims—ought to be rejected. Because religion is predicated on unsubstantiated claims of miracles, it ought to be dismissed. All the so-called miracles of religion lack evidence:
• "It is unquestionable that there is no certainty that these so-called miracles really had been performed, no certainty of the honesty and sincerity of those who recorded or said they had seen them, no certainty that they had well understood and noted down all the circumstances, no certainty that the histories really belong to those whom we attribute them, and finally, no certainty that these histories have not been corrupted and falsified."13
Reason is the only way to make sense of the world. Faith is no way at all.
A secular, humanistic ethos is our only option.We need sane and just laws, equality, honesty, truth, and socio-political decisions based on reason and knowledge and evidence and wisdom, not superstition. As Meslier preaches:
• "You will be miserable and unhappy so long as you follow the errors of religion and subject yourselves to their crazy superstitions. … Reject all these vain and superstitious practices of religions. … Only the natural lights of reason are capable of leading men to the perfection of knowledge and human wisdom, as well as to the perfection of the arts."14
Indeed, “your salvation is in your hands, your deliverance will depend only on if you can understand everything well.”15 And remember:
• "There is more intelligence, civility, knowledge, eloquence, order, clarity, coherence, precision, and even more wisdom and solid instruction in the books of philosophers, historians, and profane orators than in any of the so-called holy, sacred books. … For example … the fables of Aesop … are certainly more ingenious and instructive than all the base and crude parables that are reported in the so-called Holy Gospels."16
Finally, it must be noted that Meslier was a harsh critic of the political elites and wealthy classes who exploited the working people, an advocate of the socialist ideal of sharing the earth’s bounty in a communal fashion, and an ardent supporter of animals, writing eloquently of their right to not be subject to torture, cruelty, and killing.
The First Atheist?
It is impossible to decide who should be dubbed the first atheist in history. Should it be Brihaspati, a leading member of the Lokoyata materialists of the ancient Indian school of Carvaka philosophy, from the sixth century BCE? Or the Greek poet Diagoras of Melos, from the fifth century BCE? There’s also the Arab skeptic Muhammad al Warraq from the ninth century. And the Pole Kazimierz Łyszczyński, who wrote a small treatise called On the Non-Existence of God in the 1600s. There is also Matthias Knutzen, who wrote several pamphlets in the 1670s on atheism and is considered by many to be the first open, self-identified atheist who embraced the label. Many other contenders abound.
But surely, among this proud firmament of freethought, Jean Meslier should shine brightly. He deserves to be known, to be read, and—even better—agreed with.
Notes
1 Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (translated by Michael Shreve). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009, p. 36.
2 Michel Onfray, In Defence of Atheism, translation by Jeremy Leggatt. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2007, p. 29.
3 Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (translated by Michael Shreve), p. 41.
4 Morgane Guinard, “The Poisoned Will of Jean Meslier.” History Today, vol. 67, no. 10 (October 2017). Available online at https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/poisoned-will-jean-meslier.
5 Michel Onfray, “Jean Meslier and ‘The Gentle Inclination of Nature.’” New Politics, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 2006). Available online at https://newpol.org/issue_post/jean-meslier-and-gentle-inclination-nature/.
6 Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (translated by Michael Shreve), p. 153.
7 Ibid, p. 256.
8 Ibid, p. 397.
9 Ibid, p. 570.
10 Ibid, p. 186.
11 Ibid, p. 291.
12 Ibid, p. 63.
13 Ibid, p. 89.
14 Ibid, p. 581.
15 Ibid, p. 583.
16 Ibid, p. 103.
Atheism isn't all that different from fundamentalism because they're actually interdependent opposites. Both positions have their cracks.
Both positions have their cracks.
They are mirror images of each other.
mirror image: either of two things that look exactly the same except that the left and right sides have changed positions
Religious fundamentalism refers to the belief of an individual or a group of individuals in the absolute authority of a sacred religious text or teachings of a particular religious leader, prophet,and/ or God . These fundamentalists believe that their religion is beyond any form of criticism, and should therefore also be forced upon others. Logical explanations and scientific evidences have no place in these belief systems if they work against their religious fundamentalists. For fundamentalists, religion dictates every sphere of their daily lives, and they also attempt to involve the entire society into their own belief system, often by the use of force.
Quote:They are mirror images of each other.
I realize that you're using the term somewhat metaphorically compared to the standard definition:
mirror image: either of two things that look exactly the same except that the left and right sides have changed positions
But in what way do you see them as "mirroring" each other? Here's a description of fundamentalist religion:
Quote:Religious fundamentalism refers to the belief of an individual or a group of individuals in the absolute authority of a sacred religious text or teachings of a particular religious leader, prophet,and/ or God . These fundamentalists believe that their religion is beyond any form of criticism, and should therefore also be forced upon others. Logical explanations and scientific evidences have no place in these belief systems if they work against their religious fundamentalists. For fundamentalists, religion dictates every sphere of their daily lives, and they also attempt to involve the entire society into their own belief system, often by the use of force.
source
Other definitions might work better at illustrating your point but this one seems to outline most of the characteristics of fundamentalism and I don't see them as "mirroring" atheism. There may be isolated individual atheists who argue from a stance of militancy or absolutism but that alone doesn't make their stance a "mirror image" of anything as those characteristics might also be found in someone's political views or opinions on art, designated hitters, or even cuisine.
I'd agree that a militant atheist might be as annoying as a fundamentalist preacher but I don't think that can be applied to the whole category of self-described atheists, materialists, and unbelievers who don't worship anything, don't follow a leader or prophet, don't think of classic works of free thought as "sacred", don't pray or worship, etc. If people want to criticize atheism I think they should come up with a better description than it being a "mirror image"of anything.
One side is insisting that what we humans call "the universe" (or existence) is the result of "creation"...which necessitates, in one way or another, a CREATOR.
The other side is insisting there is no CREATOR...and that existence, in one way or another, has always been...and that this thing we humans call "the universe" was the result of "natural forces"...whatever they mean by that.
Quote:One side is insisting that what we humans call "the universe" (or existence) is the result of "creation"...which necessitates, in one way or another, a CREATOR.
The other side is insisting there is no CREATOR...and that existence, in one way or another, has always been...and that this thing we humans call "the universe" was the result of "natural forces"...whatever they mean by that.
This is the basis of my critique. The second statement is an overreach, as not all atheists propound that cosmological position. I've read atheists who willingly admit that we simply can't know certain things about the very early history of the universe. They simply reject the theistic hypothesis. I will add that, personally, naturalistic explanations based on our (limited) scientific observations lead me to reject this hypothesis as convenient and understandable but unnecessary – however, I realize that a nagging "unknown" is unacceptable in some people's minds, hence the vacuum is filled by the concept of a supreme being – who, in some people's minds, happens to be the same character who created the Garden of Eden and authored the Decalogue, and in other's is some amorphous omniscient omnipresent spirit. Okay.
Actually, Frank, your thinking led me to taking a more rigorous approach in these discussions. And if you rephrase your position as "there are some on the other side insisting that there is no CREATOR", I would offer no objection. Both of these particular perspectives make unsupportable claims for which they cannot supply evidence.
I frequently engage in religious discussions and debates on social media, and I am happy to see more and more freethinkers participating. The arguments are well fleshed out and generally focus on faith versus evidence, evolution, cosmology, the Bible, a little history, and of course, the burden of proof. Religious believers often insist that nonbelievers must prove that their god doesn’t exist; however, the burden of proof rests with the one making the claim. Still, a very powerful argument can be put forward to demonstrate that gods, if they do exist, have nothing to do with us.
This is an argument few people are aware of, and yet, in my view, it is clearly the strongest evidence against the existence of personal, theistic gods who interact with us. This is the science of quantum field theory or QFT. Britannica describes QFT as a framework—a body of physical principles combining the elements of quantum mechanics (QM) with those of relativity to explain the behavior of subatomic particles and their interactions via a variety of force fields. QFT has proved to be the single most sweeping and successful physical theory ever invented. I work in the broadband satellite industry, which is entirely dependent on QFT working as advertised.
In layman terms, QFT tells us what our observable universe is made of and how those components interact. A particle is a “quantum excitation of a field” or, more simply, a vibrating point in a field that pervades our observed universe. Integrated by four fundamental forces, it turns out that we and our natural world are composed mostly of quarks and electrons, and we know what interactions these subatomic particles are capable of. Particles have degrees of freedom, dictating which way they can move, and states (spin, mass, and charge). These parameters change in precise ways when they interact with other particles. Thanks to particle accelerators such as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), we can observe and measure the effects of these interactions. We know what does and does not interact with the stuff we are made of. For example, trillions of neutrinos flow through us on a constant basis, yet they do not interact with the particles that comprise us.
The data assures us there are no unexplained interactions involving the particles we are made of. How then does God reach in from outside space and time and interact with those particles to influence events here? If God was interacting with us, we would have found a “God field” by now, like the Higgs field we discovered in 2012. In that case, we knew we were missing a piece—how some subatomic particles acquired their mass—and eventually we found the Higgs boson, confirming the existence of the field. There are no other missing pieces for what interacts with the components we are composed of. Any god, devil, soul, ghost force, field, or particle that interacted with the things we are made of, in a way that would be meaningful, would have been discovered and documented by now and would no longer be supernatural.
This question has been asked before. In the 1640s, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters. One of the topics they discussed was Descartes’s “mind-body dualism” proposal. She asked him, “How can the soul of a man determine the spirits of his body so as to produce voluntary actions (given that the soul is only a thinking substance)?” She wanted to know how the soul and body interact. How does the soul make the body do something, and how does the body impart information to the soul? Descartes did not have a satisfactory answer then, and the situation has markedly worsened for those who propose interacting souls and bodies today.
Let’s look at the soul, which many religious people believe exists. In our subjective experience, there is an outside world full of motion and activity. There is also an internal world with pain, pleasure, emotions, and inner dialog. It’s natural to believe that these things are separate and to suppose that one can exist without the other. Religion leverages this perception to insist that we have souls that can detach from our bodies and continue to exist in some other realm. This is easy for humans to accept because most people don’t want to die.
If our consciousness somehow persists in a soul, after the body has decayed, what particles is this soul made of? How does the “information” that is a lifetime’s worth of neurons firing get transferred to this soul thing and persist? What holds it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter? Advocates for life after death don’t even try to explain how the basic physics of our fundamental particles would have to be altered for this to work. Any who have tried will have quickly discovered the absurdity of the task.
As theoretical particle physicist Brian Cox notes, if this soul is an integral part of us, it must interact “very strongly” with matter, and we know very precisely, thanks to decades of experiments, how the matter we are composed of interacts at normal room temperatures. Cox says we can safely claim that souls that interact with matter are ruled out. He uses ghosts as an example. A ghost is something that carries the imprint of a person, so it must interact with the matter making up the person. If it is an imprint of a person, it carries a pattern. If it has a pattern, it carries information. If it carries information, there must be an energy source. In the case of ghosts, some people claim to see them, which means it interacts with light, and such interactions have been ruled out again and again through experimentation.
The soul is said to be immaterial, meaning it is outside our laws of physics, yet unless a mechanism exists to retain memories, emotions, knowledge, etc., this soul would not be of much use. If our thoughts, memories, and emotions are part of the soul, then the soul must have some ability to manipulate our actions. It must have agency. What we know beyond any doubt is that unless neurons fire in specific patterns, there are no thoughts, no memories, no emotions. Thus, if the soul is going to have agency, if it is going to direct our actions in some way, it must directly or indirectly force neurons to fire in precise patterns, because, as far as mental states, nothing happens until neurons fire. So how does it do this? And conversely, how does information generated by the firing neurons get transferred to the soul?
When a perception such as sight, sound, or touch travels to our brain, it is a physical phenomenon, operating in accordance with the laws of physics, so how is it transformed into a nonmaterial thought in a soul? How is the transition made from fired neurons to something spiritual? What if the soul decides to do something? Let’s say it wants to give us a spiritual experience by firing neurons in our brain in specific patterns. The energy for this must come out of nowhere—the immaterial realm—to influence the firing of neurons. The (consistently confirmed) laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, so how does the spiritual soul grab energy out of nowhere to produce a change in our brains?
If there were a god or soul forces strong enough to interact at the cellular level, we’d have no problem observing and measuring them, and the existence of gods and souls would be well established.
We can observe and measure fields. Take for example the grade school investigation into magnetism. You sprinkle iron filings on the desk, move a magnet near them, and easily see the effects of the magnetic field acting on the metal filings. You can also see it interacting with a compass placed nearby. If gods, devils, souls, or ghosts are interacting with our neurons, it must be at a very deep level. We go down from the cellular level to the molecular, to the atomic, and finally to the subatomic arena of quarks and electrons, and even here we can observe and measure the interactions of our fundamental particles. Countless experiments over the past few decades in particle accelerators have utterly failed to discover a god, devil, soul or ghost fields, forces, or particles. Further, there are no unexplained interactions that might lead us to believe there is still a god field out there that we haven’t found yet. QFT tells us with remarkable confidence that there aren’t any “spirit particles” or “spirit forces” interacting with our material atoms, or we’d have found them. An entirely new physics would be required, proposing a completely new reality, obeying very different rules.
In my view, QFT spells the end for the supernatural. If you are going to have a religious “experience,” you’ve got to fire neurons, and to do that, you must push around quarks and electrons. If you are going to heal tissue, turn water to wine, or rise from the dead, you must push around quarks and electrons. If we were being interacted with by gods, devils, souls, or ghosts, we’d know it. All manner of psychic experiences, ghosts, ESP, levitation, mind-reading, and other supernatural phenomena requiring quarks and electrons be pushed around by some hitherto unknown force, field, or particle suffer the same problem.
How does the believer respond to this argument? In my experience, few people, religious or otherwise, have any understanding of QFT, although this is slowly changing. Certainly, it must be a subject of deep interest and concern in the Vatican and among other religious scholars and scientists. There are a growing number of good videos out there that describe QFT for the layman. Almost nobody challenges the basics presented here, so believers generally respond by insisting that God uses QFT to interact with our universe. Some believers who accept evolution insist God uses evolution as a tool to interact with the ongoing development of our natural world. This is the same problem—needing some new divinity field to push around quarks and electrons to direct evolution in a particular direction. This also raises the unfortunate question of why a good god would intentionally evolve malaria, cancer, parasites that burrow into children’s eyes, deadly viruses, and so forth.
If God is using QFT, there is a problem because QFT tells us how our observable universe works without any requirement for gods. If QFT is not how our natural world works, then it is simply an illusion and the universe must instead be controlled by God-Magic. This would mean it is a mere coincidence that the laws of physics happen to line up with the celestial paths of planets that are guided by angels along their orbits. As theoretical particle physicist Sean Carroll says in The Big Picture, “To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way we haven’t detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed. How should we modify the Core Theory equation (which describes QFT) to allow for the soul to influence the particles in our body? It’s a substantial hurdle to leap.” Can it be that our observable universe is controlled by God-Magic, and all our physics is an illusion?
I suppose this is a valid argument, but it does raise a problem—the same problem some creationists have when they claim that God planted fossils to test our faith. It makes God a deceiver, a liar, a con artist, and a cheat. Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2, and Numbers 23:19 assure us that God cannot lie. QFT suggests that either God is moot or a deceiving liar, and the Bible is wrong in calling him trustworthy.
I use a condensed version of this argument in forums and blogs and have yet to receive any serious objections to it. Science never claims to “prove” something, and this argument doesn’t irrevocably prove gods, souls, devils, and ghosts don’t exist. However, quantum mechanics is all about probabilities, and the chance that they do exist, as I understand it, is about the same as the chance that a living, breathing full-size tyrannosaurus rex dressed in a pink tutu is going to manifest in your living room at exactly 3:06 a.m. next Tuesday. Quantum mechanics says it could happen. It also says very confidently don’t wait up. source
No One Pushing Quarks Around: Souls and Quantum Field Theory
Patrick Gannon wrote:I frequently engage in religious discussions and debates on social media, and I am happy to see more and more freethinkers participating. The arguments are well fleshed out and generally focus on faith versus evidence, evolution, cosmology, the Bible, a little history, and of course, the burden of proof. Religious believers often insist that nonbelievers must prove that their god doesn’t exist; however, the burden of proof rests with the one making the claim. Still, a very powerful argument can be put forward to demonstrate that gods, if they do exist, have nothing to do with us.
This is an argument few people are aware of, and yet, in my view, it is clearly the strongest evidence against the existence of personal, theistic gods who interact with us. This is the science of quantum field theory or QFT. Britannica describes QFT as a framework—a body of physical principles combining the elements of quantum mechanics (QM) with those of relativity to explain the behavior of subatomic particles and their interactions via a variety of force fields. QFT has proved to be the single most sweeping and successful physical theory ever invented. I work in the broadband satellite industry, which is entirely dependent on QFT working as advertised.
In layman terms, QFT tells us what our observable universe is made of and how those components interact. A particle is a “quantum excitation of a field” or, more simply, a vibrating point in a field that pervades our observed universe. Integrated by four fundamental forces, it turns out that we and our natural world are composed mostly of quarks and electrons, and we know what interactions these subatomic particles are capable of. Particles have degrees of freedom, dictating which way they can move, and states (spin, mass, and charge). These parameters change in precise ways when they interact with other particles. Thanks to particle accelerators such as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), we can observe and measure the effects of these interactions. We know what does and does not interact with the stuff we are made of. For example, trillions of neutrinos flow through us on a constant basis, yet they do not interact with the particles that comprise us.
The data assures us there are no unexplained interactions involving the particles we are made of. How then does God reach in from outside space and time and interact with those particles to influence events here? If God was interacting with us, we would have found a “God field” by now, like the Higgs field we discovered in 2012. In that case, we knew we were missing a piece—how some subatomic particles acquired their mass—and eventually we found the Higgs boson, confirming the existence of the field. There are no other missing pieces for what interacts with the components we are composed of. Any god, devil, soul, ghost force, field, or particle that interacted with the things we are made of, in a way that would be meaningful, would have been discovered and documented by now and would no longer be supernatural.
This question has been asked before. In the 1640s, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters. One of the topics they discussed was Descartes’s “mind-body dualism” proposal. She asked him, “How can the soul of a man determine the spirits of his body so as to produce voluntary actions (given that the soul is only a thinking substance)?” She wanted to know how the soul and body interact. How does the soul make the body do something, and how does the body impart information to the soul? Descartes did not have a satisfactory answer then, and the situation has markedly worsened for those who propose interacting souls and bodies today.
Let’s look at the soul, which many religious people believe exists. In our subjective experience, there is an outside world full of motion and activity. There is also an internal world with pain, pleasure, emotions, and inner dialog. It’s natural to believe that these things are separate and to suppose that one can exist without the other. Religion leverages this perception to insist that we have souls that can detach from our bodies and continue to exist in some other realm. This is easy for humans to accept because most people don’t want to die.
If our consciousness somehow persists in a soul, after the body has decayed, what particles is this soul made of? How does the “information” that is a lifetime’s worth of neurons firing get transferred to this soul thing and persist? What holds it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter? Advocates for life after death don’t even try to explain how the basic physics of our fundamental particles would have to be altered for this to work. Any who have tried will have quickly discovered the absurdity of the task.
As theoretical particle physicist Brian Cox notes, if this soul is an integral part of us, it must interact “very strongly” with matter, and we know very precisely, thanks to decades of experiments, how the matter we are composed of interacts at normal room temperatures. Cox says we can safely claim that souls that interact with matter are ruled out. He uses ghosts as an example. A ghost is something that carries the imprint of a person, so it must interact with the matter making up the person. If it is an imprint of a person, it carries a pattern. If it has a pattern, it carries information. If it carries information, there must be an energy source. In the case of ghosts, some people claim to see them, which means it interacts with light, and such interactions have been ruled out again and again through experimentation.
The soul is said to be immaterial, meaning it is outside our laws of physics, yet unless a mechanism exists to retain memories, emotions, knowledge, etc., this soul would not be of much use. If our thoughts, memories, and emotions are part of the soul, then the soul must have some ability to manipulate our actions. It must have agency. What we know beyond any doubt is that unless neurons fire in specific patterns, there are no thoughts, no memories, no emotions. Thus, if the soul is going to have agency, if it is going to direct our actions in some way, it must directly or indirectly force neurons to fire in precise patterns, because, as far as mental states, nothing happens until neurons fire. So how does it do this? And conversely, how does information generated by the firing neurons get transferred to the soul?
When a perception such as sight, sound, or touch travels to our brain, it is a physical phenomenon, operating in accordance with the laws of physics, so how is it transformed into a nonmaterial thought in a soul? How is the transition made from fired neurons to something spiritual? What if the soul decides to do something? Let’s say it wants to give us a spiritual experience by firing neurons in our brain in specific patterns. The energy for this must come out of nowhere—the immaterial realm—to influence the firing of neurons. The (consistently confirmed) laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, so how does the spiritual soul grab energy out of nowhere to produce a change in our brains?
If there were a god or soul forces strong enough to interact at the cellular level, we’d have no problem observing and measuring them, and the existence of gods and souls would be well established.
We can observe and measure fields. Take for example the grade school investigation into magnetism. You sprinkle iron filings on the desk, move a magnet near them, and easily see the effects of the magnetic field acting on the metal filings. You can also see it interacting with a compass placed nearby. If gods, devils, souls, or ghosts are interacting with our neurons, it must be at a very deep level. We go down from the cellular level to the molecular, to the atomic, and finally to the subatomic arena of quarks and electrons, and even here we can observe and measure the interactions of our fundamental particles. Countless experiments over the past few decades in particle accelerators have utterly failed to discover a god, devil, soul or ghost fields, forces, or particles. Further, there are no unexplained interactions that might lead us to believe there is still a god field out there that we haven’t found yet. QFT tells us with remarkable confidence that there aren’t any “spirit particles” or “spirit forces” interacting with our material atoms, or we’d have found them. An entirely new physics would be required, proposing a completely new reality, obeying very different rules.
In my view, QFT spells the end for the supernatural. If you are going to have a religious “experience,” you’ve got to fire neurons, and to do that, you must push around quarks and electrons. If you are going to heal tissue, turn water to wine, or rise from the dead, you must push around quarks and electrons. If we were being interacted with by gods, devils, souls, or ghosts, we’d know it. All manner of psychic experiences, ghosts, ESP, levitation, mind-reading, and other supernatural phenomena requiring quarks and electrons be pushed around by some hitherto unknown force, field, or particle suffer the same problem.
How does the believer respond to this argument? In my experience, few people, religious or otherwise, have any understanding of QFT, although this is slowly changing. Certainly, it must be a subject of deep interest and concern in the Vatican and among other religious scholars and scientists. There are a growing number of good videos out there that describe QFT for the layman. Almost nobody challenges the basics presented here, so believers generally respond by insisting that God uses QFT to interact with our universe. Some believers who accept evolution insist God uses evolution as a tool to interact with the ongoing development of our natural world. This is the same problem—needing some new divinity field to push around quarks and electrons to direct evolution in a particular direction. This also raises the unfortunate question of why a good god would intentionally evolve malaria, cancer, parasites that burrow into children’s eyes, deadly viruses, and so forth.
If God is using QFT, there is a problem because QFT tells us how our observable universe works without any requirement for gods. If QFT is not how our natural world works, then it is simply an illusion and the universe must instead be controlled by God-Magic. This would mean it is a mere coincidence that the laws of physics happen to line up with the celestial paths of planets that are guided by angels along their orbits. As theoretical particle physicist Sean Carroll says in The Big Picture, “To imagine that the soul pushes around the electrons and protons and neutrons in our bodies in a way we haven’t detected is certainly conceivable, but it implies that modern physics is profoundly wrong in a way that has so far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed. How should we modify the Core Theory equation (which describes QFT) to allow for the soul to influence the particles in our body? It’s a substantial hurdle to leap.” Can it be that our observable universe is controlled by God-Magic, and all our physics is an illusion?
I suppose this is a valid argument, but it does raise a problem—the same problem some creationists have when they claim that God planted fossils to test our faith. It makes God a deceiver, a liar, a con artist, and a cheat. Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2, and Numbers 23:19 assure us that God cannot lie. QFT suggests that either God is moot or a deceiving liar, and the Bible is wrong in calling him trustworthy.
I use a condensed version of this argument in forums and blogs and have yet to receive any serious objections to it. Science never claims to “prove” something, and this argument doesn’t irrevocably prove gods, souls, devils, and ghosts don’t exist. However, quantum mechanics is all about probabilities, and the chance that they do exist, as I understand it, is about the same as the chance that a living, breathing full-size tyrannosaurus rex dressed in a pink tutu is going to manifest in your living room at exactly 3:06 a.m. next Tuesday. Quantum mechanics says it could happen. It also says very confidently don’t wait up. source
They are not "freethinkers" (as opposed to ??? "enslaved thinkers")...nor are they "nonbelievers."
Both groups are just making blind guesses about the Ultimate Reality.
