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1. Introduction

Each of us apprehends the world through our lived experience. Our senses and our reasoning faculties (not to mention our emotional states, memories, etc.) present us with the world as we directly know it. Is this the way the world “really is” or is there some underlying reality behind the veil? If so, is this underlying reality knowable or not? Or is there really nothing real there at all, with only our own constructions left over, to which we impute more substance than they deserve? These are perennial questions, which have been asked repeatedly for thousands of years. But in the last several hundred years, in western culture, we have had available a new tool with which to explore these issues: scientific thinking. Using this tool, we’ve learned a fantastic amount about the inner workings of nature, and science has indeed penetrated several layers behind the veil of our direct perceptions and common-sense thought patterns. Long before science as we understand it was conceived, however, humans employed ancient methods to penetrate beyond the veil of normal perception in an entirely different direction. Shamans, magi, prophets, and high priests used these methods to show their people a sacred vision of the world. This sense of the universe as sacred has existed in virtually every world culture over several millennia. In our contemporary western culture (which is dominating the world through so-called globalization), however, the picture of nature presented by science is often taken to be a severe challenge to the old sacred visions of nature. Since a scientific worldview is the dominant paradigm in our culture and people’s religious commitments are among the deepest they make, the issues at stake here are fundamental.

Science and Materialism

Science is restricted to the study of publicly verifiable observations, and hence is restricted to material objects (“material” is used broadly here in the sense of “composed of matter and energy”). There can be no scientific investigation of a spiritual being that acts outside spacetime and doesn’t affect the material world. Because science has no interest in non-material entities and because science has been so astoundingly successful in its endeavors, many thinkers have concluded that non-material entities (including any possible spiritual orders of reality) don’t exist. Put differently, these thinkers have concluded that the success of science demonstrates the correctness of a materialist ontology. Many commentators have shown convincingly that this argument does not withstand logical scrutiny, but these commentators have been too quick to congratulate themselves for having refuted materialism.

I believe the issues are a little more nuanced than a straightforward logical analysis implies. Along with the purely logical issues, there are also methodological issues. In addition to the actual content of science (what we know and how we know it), there is also the process of doing science (producing new knowledge). A materialist ontology combined with commitment to a scientific analytic process results in a stance that might be called “scientific materialism.” It is this view, scientific materialism, that I will often refer to as a mundane view of the world, and I will argue that this mundane worldview is in fact the most conducive ontology within which to do scientific work and to understand the results of that work. A mundane apprehension of nature is not logically entailed by the results of science, but it certainly fits very comfortably with those results. The rising fortunes of scientific materialism historically occurring simultaneously with the increasing success of science itself is thus not entirely an accident, nor is it merely the result of aggressive ideologues. Ultimately, I will argue that a mundane view is not only useful but is even, within its limits, correct. In other words, while doing and understanding science, we live in a mundane world. These issues will be examined more carefully in Chapter 3.

Science and Religion

Science, as we’ve already noted, is only concerned with a limited part of the totally available human experience. Aesthetic judgments, ethical decisions, and religious wisdom all lie outside the purview of science, for example. Religions have traditionally been centrally important parts of most human cultures, and the knowledge claims of religions have both areas of overlap and areas of disjunction with the knowledge claims appropriate to science. Leaving aside many of the social, moral and political roles that religion might play (for good or for ill) in a culture, I am mostly concerned here with the knowledge claims a religion might make. In other words, a certain religious vision of the world might entail some assertions about the way the world is. If these assertions do not overlap with any of the appropriate statements that science can make about the world, then science and religion can neither conflict with nor support each other. For example, a religious assertion is that “God exists” and no scientific result can possibly confirm or deny this assertion. On the other hand, the religious assertion that “the world is 6000 years old” contains a prominent empirical component which can be tested against valid scientific knowledge and found to be wrong. This latter example is a case of conflict, and many prominent writers have promoted the idea that conflict between science and religion has been common and is probably inevitable. Many others (myself included) have noted that this is nonsense and that the problems virtually never turn out to be an “inevitable conflict between science and religion” but instead are simply ill-informed people making invalid claims given their grounds for belief. If proponents of science and of religion are careful to make claims that are truly justified within the limits of their discourse, then most such claims will not overlap and hence have no possibility of conflicting. There are, however, a set of issues and questions in which the overlap is significant and the claims potentially inconsistent; in these cases, Barbour suggests that in addition to conflict and independence there might also be either dialogue or integration between science and religion. A great deal of interesting literature has been devoted to these issues and questions at the boundary between science and religion (see, for example, the works by Russell et al., Barbour, Peters, Artigas, and many others).

The Role of Nature

Where would we expect to find these boundary questions? Since science is a study of the natural world, and since this natural world may well have religious significance, then our conceptualization of nature is likely to be one of these boundary areas. The present work is deeply concerned with the role of nature as a crossing point between the concerns of science and those of religion. Before proceeding further, though, I should clarify what I mean by nature. I don’t mean just the beautiful areas of the earth unsullied by civilization, like old growth forests or the arctic tundra. By nature, I mean the natural world in toto, including the entire universe and also including human beings as a part of nature. We might speak of the cosmos or of physical reality, and these terms would also be consistent with my broad usage of the word nature in this context. The conceptualization of nature has varied radically in different cultures throughout the ages, and by way of example we examine how several specific cultures have thought about nature in Chapter 2.

How would a religious view of nature differ from a scientific view? There’s no single answer to this question, and strictly speaking it need not differ greatly. We’ve seen, though, that despite the lack of logical compulsion to formulate a single particular scientific view of nature, that the most common way to view nature from a scientific perspective is to adopt the mundane outlook of scientific materialism. Likewise, I would argue that after looking at a variety of religious attitudes toward nature we might conclude that a typical religious view of nature can be best described as sacred. The sense in which nature is sacred might very well differ greatly among different religions. After all, religions themselves differ: some have a single deity, some have many deities, some have no deity at all. Nature is crucially and centrally important in some religions, of only minor import in others. Nature is sometimes sanctified by the presence of deity in nature itself, but in other cases by a deity outside nature. In all cases, however, there is some sense in which nature is indeed sacred. We will discuss what this means more precisely and explore the different ways in which nature might be considered sacred in Chapter 4.

Summarizing the view of nature we have developed thus far, we find that nature is mundane (in the sense of scientific materialism) and that nature is sacred (from various sorts of religious perspective). So, nature is mundane, and also nature is sacred. I have identified nature as one of the boundary lines where science and religion intersect, where each perspective has potentially valid claims to make. These two claims (nature is mundane; nature is sacred), however, appear to contradict each other. After further examination in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, the seeming contradiction only becomes stronger. To make both of these claims constitutes an antinomy, and we might well demand to know which is right and which is wrong. The claims of science and religion conflict, and we need to resolve the problem.

The main thesis of the present work is that both claims are valid and correct. Nature is sacred. I believe that this is true. Nature is mundane. I believe that this is equally true, and furthermore I will argue that there is not necessarily a logical contradiction between these two claims.

Complementarity

In order to show that we can believe both of these apparently contradictory statements (and more importantly that we can live in both of these apparently mutually exclusive worlds), I need to introduce the idea of complementarity. Complementarity is a logical framework for the analysis of ideas in which the exclusive binary relationships between categories found in classical Aristotelian logic no longer hold. Although we will be much concerned with Niels Bohr’s famous formulation of complementarity, let’s start with a simpler example: Imagine a certain piece of music. Now imagine further that this piece of music is played by a solo violin. How would we describe the music? One option is to specify completely the overtone frequencies in the sound emitted by the violin, which in principle specifies everything we can hear and would thus want to know (it is this kind of information that is engraved on a recorded CD). But this description is solely in terms of the physical sound. Alternatively, we could specify the musical notes, i.e. each pitch and its duration; in this case, there is no sound at all associated with our description, except insofar as the notes can be played (if desired) on some instrument to create a sound. If the instrument is chosen to be a trumpet, the actual sounds will quite different from our first description, and yet the piece of music will be the same. So, we have two alternative descriptions, and they are very different from each other (to the point of being mutually exclusive, at least in a limited sense) since one description is in terms of physical sounds and the other description is in terms of symbolic notations. Of course, the two descriptions are intimately related; they are both describing the same piece of music. Indeed, we can claim that both of these descriptions are necessary in order to have a complete understanding of the piece of music. With only one or the other, we would be missing something essential. This is the essential meaning of complementarity: there are situations in which mutually exclusive alternative descriptions of some phenomenon are not only logically compatible but are both essential in order to have a complete understanding. We refer to such descriptions as complementary descriptions of the phenomenon.

An excellent overview of complementarity, including its relationships to classical logic, to medieval theological thought, and to Kantian philosophy has been given by MacKinnon1. More recently, based upon many years of work, Reich2 has broadened the ideas inherent in complementarity and relabeled the broadened set of ideas as “relational and contextual reasoning” (RCR), which he contrasts with binary, dialectic, and analogical reasoning. Reich carefully examines the logical status of RCR and develops a set of heuristic methods to apply this form of reasoning to issues and problems; a number of specific issues and problems are analyzed in some detail to illustrate the application of RCR thinking and the value it has. An early champion of complementarity was MacKay3, who has contributed both a rigorous analysis of the logical status of complementarity and who has also urged its use in clarifying the relationships between scientific and religious thought. Mackay emphasizes the status of complementarity as a purely logical concept that defines relationships different in kind from other logical concepts such as contradiction, independence, and identity. It’s this added set of possible relationships that make complementarity valuable as a framework for examining concepts, and MacKay notes that this value is especially apparent at the science/religion boundary. “…whether we like it or not, we need it; and by ‘we’ I mean […] anyone […] who wants to avoid logical blunders in seeking to bring science and faith into confrontation.”4 In emphasizing complementarity as a logical relation as opposed to its well-known role in modern physics, however, we need to be careful to not underplay the extremely important work done by Niels Bohr in developing complementarity along several novel lines of thought. It’s also important to disentangle the use of complementarity as a generic logical or heuristic analytic tool from the more specialized development of Bohr and the implications of that development.

Bohr’s Work

The problem that Bohr set out to solve arose in the context of early attempts to understand quantum physics. The experimental results that were available for understanding the properties of matter and radiation at a microscopic level had become very puzzling. One set of experiments demonstrated unequivocally that both radiation (e.g. light) and matter (e.g. electrons) were wave phenomena: undulations that are not localized in space. Contrariwise, another set of experiments demonstrated unequivocally that both radiation and matter were composed of pointlike particles, quite localized in space and bearing no resemblance to waves. The energies of the particles were found to be in discrete states, which changed discontinuously, and these discontinuities were related in some way to a physical constant of nature, Planck’s constant h. A more detailed discussion of all this work and its implications is presented in Chapter 6. Eventually, a self-consistent and rigorous mathematical theory was developed for quantum physics, and this theory has been applied to particular physical systems with spectacular success ever since. The major unresolved problem was the interpretation of the theory, i.e. trying to figure out just what the mathematics is telling us about the structure of physical reality. Not surprisingly, the strange features of the experimental results were also found in the mathematical theory. The peculiar discontinuities, the presence of both wavelike and particlelike properties, and the lack of classical determinism were all inherent in the mathematics but not well understood in any sense. In 1927, Niels Bohr presented a piece of work in which he hoped to clarify all these murky points.

The work that Bohr presented was not well understood (or well received) by the physics community, because it turned out that the issues Bohr addressed were not issues in physics but rather issues in epistemology. The heart of his solution to the interpretive problems of quantum theory was complementarity, and Bohr had a specific and precisely defined meaning for complementarity in this context. The starting point for Bohr’s line of reasoning is the discontinuous energy changes that occur in the microworld due to the existence of Planck’s constant. Bohr refers to this as the “quantum postulate” and it is a contingent fact of nature, not a logical necessity. The quantum postulate is a fact of the world as we find it, and Bohr asserts that this fact carries an implication: due to the quantum postulate, all interactions with physical systems are liable to uncontrollable discontinuous exchanges of energy. The importance of these discontinuities hinges on Bohr’s next assertion, which is an epistemological statement. Bohr argues that we only know the properties of a physical system by interacting with it. A totally isolated system has no real meaning for us, because it can disclose no information. Hence, all of our knowledge of the system is acquired through interactions, and all of the interactions include uncontrollable discontinuities. Our knowledge of the world is thus severely limited, not by technological restrictions but by deep issues linked to how we know the world at all. Developing these themes further, Bohr shows that we can define the state of a system if we wish to, but only by giving up any knowledge of the space and time coordinates associated with the system. Alternatively, we can know the space and time coordinates of the system but this then precludes our ability to know its dynamical properties (such as energy and momentum). This latter restriction is extremely important, because conservation of these dynamical quantities is what insures the orderly dynamical behavior of the system (what Bohr refers to as “the claim of causality”). In this way, Bohr arrives at the conclusion that to understand these physical systems we need to use two complementary pictures, that of spacetime coordination and that of cause/effect relations. They are complementary because each picture excludes the other yet both are needed for a complete understanding of the system. Using this framework, Bohr was then able to explain the observed wave/particle duality and the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in terms of complementarity.

A more detailed and extensive treatment of Bohr’s development of complementarity in the interpretation of quantum physics is given in Chapter 7. Excellent expositions of this material are also given by Folse5 and by Faye6 (on both of whom I draw extensively in this work) and also by MacKinnon1. For our present purposes, we should merely note two further points: First, the combined and integrated spacetime and causal views form the basis of classical determinism, and that’s why determinism of this sort is not possible in quantum theory. Second, and perhaps more germane to the arguments we are developing here, Bohr carefully notes that which picture we employ depends on the manner in which we observe the system. In other words, the knowledge we have about a system depends on the experimental arrangement, i.e. on the details of how we acquire this knowledge. This may sound trivial, but it’s not; put succinctly, whether we see a wave or a particle depends on how we look. This conclusion of Bohr’s development has profound (and controversial) epistemological (and perhaps even ontological) implications. But the implications of Bohr’s work, however important, are restricted to the empirical sciences. In order to address the concerns we have raised regarding the validity of both a mundane and a sacred view of nature, we must pass beyond the limitations imposed by such restrictions. How is Bohr’s complementarity related to these issues?

Complementarity, Science, and Religion

Complementarity as developed by Bohr and complementarity as a generic logical relations tool have both been employed in the science/religion dialogue, but often in ways that don’t properly distinguish between them and sometimes the uses are claimed to be of questionable validity. Criticisms have been offered by Sharpe7 and by Duce8 on the grounds that complementarity is an overly limited conception that hinders the attempt to truly engage the two discourses. Other criticism has come from Barbour9, Alexander10, and Bedau11 on the grounds that two complementary descriptions must be of the same logical type, a condition violated in the case of science and theology (or religion more generally). Watts, on the other hand, has presented an extended analysis of the issues that includes consideration of previous criticisms, arguing in the end that science and theology are indeed complementary forms of discourse12. Reich2 also concludes that complementarity (at least in his more broadly rendered RCR formulation) is a highly valuable approach to relating science and theology. Some recent exciting work has explored another variation on these ideas of this sort, known as Generalized Quantum Theory (GQT)13. This work draws on the formal structure of quantum mechanics, especially non-commutation, entanglement, and nonlocality. Complementarity plays a central role in this approach to the analysis of issues, and a number of phenomena have been fruitfully explored using GQT. Finally, it’s also worth noting that complementarity has been used strictly within theological discourse (by Loder & Neidhardt14 and by Honner15, for example) to address issues such as the simultaneous humanity and divinity of Christ.

In many of these cases, both the supporters and the critics of using complementarity to discuss the science/religion relationship face a key issue in whether to use complementarity as developed by Bohr and applied in physics or to use complementarity as a generic logical tool independent of any such use in physics. Much of the inspiration for the application of complementarity in the science/religion area certainly stemmed from the prominence and celebrity it attained in a fundamental part of physical science. Yet all of these commentators, both proponents and critics, point out the major difference between complementarities within physics and the proposed complementarities between scientific and religious discourse. The arguments are over the validity of the application of complementarity in the latter case, and there is sometimes ambiguity over whether a given application is construed as the use of Bohr’s version of complementarity or the use of the more general conceptualization going by the same name.

Bohr explicitly intended the complementarity framework he developed to be applied in objective empirical sciences (he had hoped that it would be valuable in many such sciences, especially biology and psychology). Hence, his reasoning must be modified accordingly if we wish to adapt it to problems outside the sciences, as in the science/religion relationship. Some commentators have expressed the view that complementarity as it is used in physics is so different from what is needed in science/religion discourse that it is essentially useless. A concept forged in the struggle to interpret a physical theory can’t be applicable in the broader arena that includes religious faith and claims well outside science. I have already alluded to the limitations built into complementarity as used in quantum physics, but I disagree with the contention that it is irrelevant. There is important content in the careful and sophisticated formulation of complementarity developed by Bohr, content that is not inherent in the more generic version of complementarity as a logical tool. I believe that this content is in fact useful and important for analyzing issues at the boundary between science and religion, and more particularly for the sacred/mundane antinomy that I am exploring in the present work. In order to use the aforementioned content, however, we must follow Bohr’s reasoning and suitably generalize this reasoning. Bohr’s brilliant contribution to epistemology needs to be generalized and modified at appropriate points to give us a form of complementarity that retains all of his insights but that is not restricted to the empirical sciences and objective knowledge.

Generalized Complementarity

At the heart of Bohr’s reasoning is his contention that all of our knowledge about a physical object comes through some interaction with that object. In the case of quantum physics, the interaction takes the form of some experimental apparatus, and this can be precisely specified and described. If we wish to broaden this epistemological lesson to the world at large, what should play the role of the experimental apparatus? In addressing this question, the first thing we notice is that this more general case quite obviously demands the presence of a conscious observer, a knowing subject interacting with the object in the world. (The potential need for conscious knowing observers in quantum theory has been a controversial point of contention; we will assume here, in agreement with Bohr, that conscious observers are unnecessary in quantum theory.) The implications of needing knowing subjects for the acquisition of knowledge have long been a traditional problem in philosophy, a prominent example being the critical philosophy of Kant and his successors. What is new here is to think of this as an extension of the insights gained by examining the problem of knowledge in light of the issues we find in quantum theory, because that is the process by which complementarity takes on a central importance and a new methodological clarity.

Bohr’s contentions concerning the inseparability of the observer from the object of knowledge carried a drastic implication: knowledge of the object is no longer independent of the conditions of observation. This aspect of the subject/object relationship is a crucial ingredient in the development of complementarity. Because knowledge of the world depends on the conditions of observation, we need to carefully specify these conditions in order to have any meaningful knowledge at all. In the case of atomic physics, the specifications merely concern experimental arrangements, and the only knowledge we might want is objective knowledge. For the more general subject/object context presently under discussion, knowledge concerning nature will not necessarily be objective. The crucial importance of carefully specifying the conditions of observation, however, is once again mandated by the inclusion of an observer, just as in Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. But our generalization requires that we go well beyond the mere description of an experimental arrangement. For the case of a knowing subject, the kinds of questions being asked; the state of consciousness of the observer; the modes of communication possible and those employed; the role of multiple observers and/or technology used in observation; the effects of culture and history, of time, place, and intention; all these things must be taken into account in order to understand the meaning of any knowledge we may have of nature. Answering these kinds of questions constitutes the methodology that I’m advocating in this work. Performed successfully, a proper specification of the conditions under which knowledge of nature is acquired results in the complementarity framework being free of logical contradictions. The conditions under which nature is found to be sacred are not those under which it is mundane. Both sets of conditions are valid, both are needed for a complete view; and both refer to the same world. This world, I contend, is both sacred and mundane.

The foregoing points are the central message of this work. These points are presented in Chapter 8 in a more detailed form, along with several specific examples of the mundane/sacred dichotomy (Mount Fuji, the body of a loved one, and a crystal) to illustrate the thinking and methodology. More examples and applications, including extended discussions in some cases, are found in Chapters 10-12. Chapter 8 also includes a discussion of how complementarity relates to monolithic logical integration at one extreme and to dualistic or dialectic approaches at the other extreme. I argue that complementarity is not a form of dualism but rather a special kind of integrated worldview that respects the conditions under which we acquire knowledge. There are still, however, some remaining metaphysical issues that need to be discussed. Does our knowledge of the world affect the world itself? Are these complementary views saying something about reality or merely something about our internal mental constructions? Does objectivity have a privileged status, and if so doesn’t this imply an asymmetry between the mundane and sacred apprehensions that privileges the mundane view? These difficult questions are taken up in Chapter 9, where I draw very heavily on the work of Bohr’s philosophical mentor, Harald Hoffding. Although I don’t pretend to solve these age-old perennial problems of metaphysics, I do argue that no view is truly privileged in a complementarity framework and that if we take complementarity seriously then we are, in the end, making ontological claims about the world.

The Only Sacred Ground

In summary, I claim that nature is mundane (in the sense of scientific materialism) and that nature is sacred (in the sense of living spiritual presence); my claim is not self-contradictory because the mundane and sacred dimensions of nature are complementary aspects of its being. The complementarity framework I use is based on the work of Niels Bohr, but it has been greatly generalized beyond Bohr’s formulation because I am considering knowing subjects apprehending nature with no artificial restrictions. We can only have knowledge of the world by interacting with the world, and so our knowledge is only meaningful when we examine the conditions under which we come to know it. This is why the world can be, and is, both mundane and sacred. We only have one world, but it must reveal itself to us with both of these aspects, and we impoverish ourselves to the extent that we reject one aspect or the other.