The Naturalist and God

Naturalism: Belief that the final reality is strictly matter and

energy. One for whom all gods are dead, for whom all meaning and

purpose are human in origin, ungrounded in either nature itself or in

the transcendent.

Panthiest: A person for whom the final reality is really divine.

One for whom the dance of the atoms is the ultimate dance of the

spirit.

Naturalism and pantheism seem to be polar opposites, yet a door has

been opening between them. The so-called "New Age physics" of Fritjof

Capra, Gary Zukav, and Michael Talbot tries to link material science

with Eastern pantheism, the most spiritual of world views.

We can see one scientist stepping through that door to pantheism in

the popular writings of Lewis Thomas. Thomas, chancellor of

Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York City, received his

M.D. from Harvard in 1937 and has had a productive career in medical

research. A collection of his essays first published in the New

England Journal of Medicine became a best seller, The lives of a cell:

Notes of a biology watcher (1973). That was followed by another

collection, The Medusa and the snail (1979), and The Youngest Science

(1983).

In his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration, "On the Uncertainty of

Science" (Given June 1980; published in Harvard Magazine, Sept-Oct

1980), Thomas struggles to make sense out of the whole of reality.

What is the universe like? What does it mean? Who are we? Why are we

here?

He accepts two basic tenets of naturalism: (1) That nature is

ultimate all there is (There is no creator God who brought the world

into being); and (2) that human beings evolved out of nature alone

(There is no super-added soul).

But Thomas refuses to accept the

typical naturalistic implications. He rejects the "intellectually

fashionable view of man's place in nature," the nihilist conclusion

that it "makes no sense at all" (Page 20), that the universe is

"meaningless for human beings." And he rejects the existialist

conclusion that humankind's meaning is merely human, merely our own

imagined values. Instead, Thomas affirms that nature itself is

meaningless.

Throughout that lecture Thomas uses personal language for nature's

ways. Human language, he says, is a mysterious "gift" (page 20). He

calls the symbiotic character of nature the "urge" to form

"partnerships" (page 21), The "invention" of the DNA molecule was the

greatest achievement of nature. "Nature has exhibited such restraint

and good taste in evolution" (page 21), and "nature has been kind to

us" (page 21).

Even the mechanism of evolution - natural selection -

is given a personal twist. Like a naturalist, he agrees that error

(accident, randomness) is the driving force in evolution, but he

points out that the word "error" comes from an Indo-European root

meaning, "to wander about, looking for something" (page 21).

Surely, we think, a scientist does not take such language

literally. He must be using it metaphorically, to put some "life" into

a popular lecture. Or perhaps the words are what Francis Schaffer

calls semantic mysticism, language used by naturalist to ease the

burden of seeing ourselves alone in the universe. Its nice to feel

that nature cares.

No, Thomas is serious. He confesses: "I cannot make my peace with

the randomness doctrine: I cannot abide in the notion of

purposelessness and blind chance in nature. And yet I do not know what

to put in its place for the quieting of my mind. It is absurd to say

that a place like this place is absurd, when it contains, in front of

your eyes, so many billions of different forms of life, each one in

its own way absolutely perfect, all linked together to form what would

surely seem to an outsider a hugh spherical organism (page 21).

Christians would say, "Of course, Dr. Thomas. You've just

recognized the truth of Psalm 19:1 "The heavens are telling the glory

of God; and the firmament proclaims His handiwork."

But, we read on: "We talk ... about the absurdity of the human

situation, but we do this because we do not know how we fit in, or

what we are for. The stories we used to make up to explain ourselves

do not make sense any more, and we have run out of new stories for the

moment" (page 21). Thomas rejects all traditional religious

explanations of human meaning - including the Christian one.

But Thomas refuses to give up hope. His works are imbued with a

strong spirit of optimism, of luck, his word for humankind's natural

history so far. He endows the word with almost divine attributes: "We

are . . . the most impossible of all earth's creatures, and maybe it

is not beyond hope that we are also endowed with improbable luck" (The

Youngest Science, page 248).

Thomas asks, "What I would like to know most about the developing

earth is: Does it already have a mind? Or will it someday gain a mind,

and are we part of that? Are we a tissue for the earth's awareness?"

(page 21). And he speculates, "I would like to think that we are on

our way to becoming an embryonic central nervous system for the whole

system" (page 22).

In lives of a cell Thomas suggested that at death perhaps human

consciousness is "somehow separated off at the filaments of its

attachment, and drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of

its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system . . ."

Then he added, "but I have no data on the matter" (page 61)< realizing

that his speculations might be hubris or false hope. We could just as

well be a "transient tissue, replaceable, . . . on our way down under

the hill, interesting fossils for contemplation by some other

creature>" Yet, Thomas wanted to end his 1980 lecture on a note of

hope.

We see in Thomas the pilgrimage of a truly modern man, raised as a

dues-paying naturalist, beginning to play at the edges of pantheism.

Note the sequence of his thought:

1) Naturalism poses a purposeless, meaningless cosmos. Human beings

are the result of random accidents of the evolutionary process

channeled only by survival of the fittest.

2) But the universe is obviously not absurd. It's too orderly, too

beautiful, and, with the coming of humankind, too personal. nature

belies a naturalistic metaphysic.

3) Therefore, nature must be intrinsically meaningful,

intrinsically personal or, with the rise of humankind, "becoming"

personal.

For Thomas, the Judeo-Christian concept of a personal Creator is

one of those stories considered no longer credible. But which is more

credible: (1) a universe that is developing personhood, requiring

something (the personal) to COME FROM NOTHING (the non-personal); (2)

a universe that's always been personal and thus, via its own nature,

DESIGNED the DNA template; or (3) a universe that has God as its

infinite, personal Creator? In his writings Thomas vacillates between

the first two views - both forms of pantheism.

Lewis Thomas stands as a symbol of the modern dilemma. Without God

he cries for meaning, and he has to take it where he can get it.

(Written by James W. Sire)