This is my first, very embarrassing draft of what's been churning
around in my mind for the last few years. I'm expecting that it will
be completely incoherent, illogical and fail to make any kind of
coherent point. I'm hoping that some kind folks will suffer their way
through it and politely point out the worst mistakes and silliness.

In thinking about my personal faith, I have been wondering whether
Christianity is scientific, and this leads in a meandering way through
how we could have a soul and how the theology of free will and
evolution interact.

This is a simple enough question, but let me clarify. I'm not asking
"are all Christians applying the scientific method to their faith?"
(most are not, which is to be expected). Nor "did Christianity have
anything to do with the development of science in the western world?"
(probably). Not "has the Christian church obstructed scientific
progress?" (almost definitely). Nor even "will Christians stop
spouting unscientific nonsense in trying to evangelise to others?"
(sadly not, I suspect).

What I've been puzzling over is -- how do I reconcile what I know of
the world through science with what I understand of God and the human
condition through the Christian tradition? What new insights does 2000
years of scientific study bring us?

There are three ways that religions can coexist with science:

1. Say nothing of any significance, and be so vague as to make no
   testable prediction. New Age philosophies seem to take this
   approach, and it seems to me that Hinduism does much the same
   (although I really don't know enough about it to be sure).

2. Be fundamentalist, and where science conflicts with a religious
   credo, deny the validity of the science even if it requires
   extraordinary suspension of disbelief to do so. Islam necessarily
   does this -- if the Qu'ran is the genuine word of Allah, then any
   scientific finding conflicting with it is an attack on the religion
   itself. Thus, most Islamic nations prohibit the teaching of
   evolution. Denial of the Apollo moon landings happens sometimes as
   well, as another example. Scarily, it seems that many southern
   baptist churches are heading down this road.
 
3. Make falsifiable, testable predictions and be prepared to discover
   that cherished beliefs might be wrong. In the best cases this might
   mean a review to correct some mistaken concept, and worst it might
   throw the whole religion out. This path is, I think, the only
   valid and legitimate path to take if "religious truth" is not to
   become an oxymoron.

Either Christianity is true -- with the mind-boggling statement that the
creator of the universe is personally interested in each and every one
of us individually -- or it is not. If it is true, then it must say
something of significance which can be measured and quantified,
otherwise it is irrelevant superstition.

The best I have come up with is that the power of prayer is testable
and falsifiable.

Prayer should have an effect. At the very least, it should change the
one who prays.

Looking at the various studies of prayer-supported medical treatment,
I would want to see an effect of some kind in a well-designed
study. I've garnered opinions and asked pastors and respected
theologians about this, and a few comments (paraphrased) have me still
thinking about what effect we should see, and under what conditions.

- in the first world, where the death of a family breadwinner is not a
  guaranteed road to suffering and poverty of the remainder of the
  family, we would expect to see less miraculous healing than in the
  third world, where such healing would be more likely to create a
  response of adoration, awe and worship of God.

- calling something a double-blind trial will probably be meaningless,
  since we are trying to measure the presence of an omniscient God who
  would know the results of any randomisation. Believing that the
  trial is double-blinded probably indicates a faulty
  methodology. This is of course, bizarre, and unlike any other
  medical study, where double-blinded trials are the gold standard.

- comparing against a placebo is very, very difficult. Is it the case
  that two prayers are more effective than a single prayer? Or prayers
  by two people are more effective than from one? Because without
  those very dubious assumptions, the "ambient prayer level" for
  individuals undergoing treatment might have the same effect as the
  noise+signal of the non-placebo group

- it might be the case that performing such a trial without a calling
  from God to do so might be blasphemous or sinful in some way. (I
  don't fully understand this comment.)

- Perhaps the mean time of recovery from an illness might the same for
  the prayed-for and non-prayed for groups, but the standard
  deviations will be different. It is not uncommon for Christians to
  pray "dear God, heal him or let him die quickly and painlessly".

- Christians do have very clear promises from God that he will honour
  prayers for personal holiness. This should surely be measurable
  somehow, and saves the complications involved in establishing a
  reliable experimental theology of miraculous healing.

In short summary, we're still trying to decide what effect we would
see, but I have found near universal belief that there would be
something to see.

Amusingly, a careful trial could resolve the predestination vs
free-will debate which has divided Christian scholars for centuries,
although there is a certain ethical dubiousness in taking a large
number of non-Christians and deliberately choosing not to pray for the
salvation of some of them!

But there are other more subtle questions. For there to be a
judgement, a heaven and a hell (although Jehovah's Witnesses and some
Anglican theologians would argue against this last one as anything
other than a termination-of-existence) there needs to be some
continuity of personhood through death.

Obviously, the question of "is there a here-after?" is unfalsifiable
in itself (except through personal experience, by which time it is too
late to report the findings to anyone still alive). What I puzzle over
is how this could occur given what we know of brain physiology, and
what theological and scientific implications this might have.

Personal continuity through death could happen in one of two ways --
perhaps we have an eternal soul, inhabiting a spiritual realm apart
from the physical universe; alternatively, perhaps we don't.

The latter case is I think the less likely and the harder to make
sense of. If the thing that is "me" is nothing but atoms and
molecules, with no spiritual component, then my continuity is guided
by the laws of the physical universe. Let us be a little bit
over-confident and assume that we already know all the relevant
fundamental physics determining this, or that if we don't now, we will
one day. Then it should be quite possible to run a simulation of
myself on a computer.

Note that this is not necessarily deterministic -- the Heisenburg
uncertainty principle at the very least should introduce enough
randomness that the simulation of "me" and the original "me" should
both end up thinking different thoughts and responding to stimuli in
different ways eventually.

So there is a continuity and individuality even without human beings
having a direct link into the spiritual realm.

Clearly, if it is possible to simulate someone's mental process using
technology within the universe, it is all the more possible for God to
"snapshot" the state of a person (including collecting the full
quantum state, thus side-stepping the Uncertainty principal). So it
would certainly be possible for God to take our last conscious moment
and reconstruct that to fashion an immortal form for those he loves.

I do have several niggles about this:

 - why reconstruct just the last conscious state? Why not all the
   "me"s that have ever existed. In my teenage years I was a much more
   fervent believer (and also sadly even more obnoxious than I am now,
   much to the disbelief of most recent acquaintances). Would there
   not be a place in heaven for the "me" that was? Or will be?

 - what about the senile, the brain-damaged, the grown-insane? If we
   view them as "broken" then perhaps we could assume that God fixes
   the breakage during the transformation to the immortal. But now the
   continuity of personhood changes

 - presumably intelligence is a feature of our (non-spiritual)
   personhood, which would be preserved in the creation of any
   simulation. I find it odd to think that in eternity we would only
   be as clever as we are now -- not least to think that the same
   would apply for memory capacity, which would have to get exhausted
   eventually given an infinite amount of time for things to happen.


For these reasons, I think I find it easier to believe that there is a
spiritual realm, and that we are citizens of both the physical and the
spiritual. This seems more biblical too.

Now of course we have the problem of how the physical and spiritual
interact. Scientists have tried to perform brain imaging scans of
people praying, and during meditation and so forth, and attempted to
pinpoint what area of the brain is most active, or most distinctly
different during "spiritual" activities. While some findings from this
approach would be fascinating, I am expecting this idea will rapidly
be discovered to be fundamentally misguided.

While I have heard some physicists and philosophers outline the
following discussion (usually in regard to understanding free will), I
haven't seen anywhere a coherent document that tries to link
personhood and spirituality with we know of quantum theory. That is,
there is bound to be some nonsense written. Tragically, I suspect my
next few paragraphs are unlikely to improve the situation much.

There are many different interpretations of quantum physics. For the
most part they are equivalent. The following interpretation I found
useful when I was first learning about quantum computation.

All quantum systems (and that really means everything in the universe)
alternate between bursts of quantum operations (where it is normal for
a cat to be both alive and dead simultaneously) and observations,
where the system collapses down to fewer simultaneous
states. Depending on what sort of observation it is, you will probably
collapse the system down to just one simple relevant state (e.g. the
cat is alive and not even slightly dead).

To explain further, I have to use some mathematics
unfortunately. Taking poor Schroedinger's cat, who is locked in an
unobservable box being both dead and alive, a physicist would write
something like this:

 0.7071 ¦ cat alive >   +   -0.7071 ¦ cat dead >

The 0.7071 and -0.7071 numbers are known as the amplitudes of the
corresponding states.

During an observation (e.g. when someone opens the box to see whether
cat is alive or dead) the "system" squares each amplitude to get a
probability. (Actually it's more complicated than that, but it's close
enough). 0.7071*0.7071=0.5 and (-0.7071)*(-0.7071)=0.5 as well. So
both the cat being alive and the cat being dead are equally likely
things to see.

So the "system" randomly picks between the two.

It's true to say that currently, there is no scientific understanding of how that randomness works. 

 - It could be that there is a giant list of random numbers written in
   a giant book somewhere outside of the physical universe, and every
   time a quantum system is observed, the next random number from the
   book is consulted to work out which state it should collapse into.

 - Or there could be some underlying physical process which determines
   the collapses of systems when they are observed, but we have at
   this stage no idea how this might operate, nor anything more about
   it.

A God who only controls which way quantum systems collapse might only
be a "God-of-the-gaps-in-scientific-thought" but that's more than
enough to control the entire destiny of the universe, perform
miracles, turn water into wine (it's just a sequence of extremely
unlikely state collapses), and so on.

Thought and decision making is likely to be some kind of summation of
the collapsed states of zillions of tiny quantum systems. That is,
weighing up whether or not to cross a busy street is probably "ome
process in the brain asking whether more neurons concluded 'go' than
'wait'," Those neurons' outputs are bunches of chemicals sloshing in
one direction rather than another, caused by electrical charge
gradients, which are ultimately electrons either free from their
nuclei or still held captive. Electron release and capture is a
quantum affair -- most of the time they would be in a superposition of
captured and not captured, with the occasional observation forcing it
to collapse randomly into one or the other.

Random? God Himself could choose the collapse. What if my citizenship
of the spiritual realm gives me control over (some) of the collapses?

This is what I (currently) believe to be way things must be. We have a
spiritual existence independent of the physical world -- it is not our
consciousness, nor our mind, but to some extent it influences both. We
make choices, for right or for wrong. Sometimes those choices are
purely mechanistic and handled by the physical process in our
brain. Occassionally -- perhaps for little more than those decisions
where there is a for-good or for-evil decision to make -- our
spiritual side can cause the right quantum collapses to occur to make
our physical brain process choose what the spiritual realm wants.

This means that there is some amount of free will -- and therefore
judgement is reasonable. The spiritual side of the senile and deranged
may be intact, but simply unable to sufficiently influence the
physical sufficiently to cause anything to happen. There is a soul
which can persist through death.

Of course little in the above discussion could be regarded as
scientific, because it says little that could be falsified. But it
provides at least a way that we can be both spiritual and physical --
something that has puzzled philosophers for centuries! -- and matches
what everyone feels -- that we have some kind of free will to make
decisions which is more than just an illusion.

There is one final aspect of the interaction between scientific
thought and Christianity which I want to explore -- times when
scientific thought gives us a deeper insight into the God we worship.

I had an experience of this nature when reading Steven Baxter's
novelisation of the evolution of humankind on earth. (Appropriately
called "Evolution").

Unlike the majority of Christians, I don't think Genesis is meant to
be an accurate description of the creation of the world. I believe it
might have been written by human hand with that intention, but that
they most certainly got it wrong; but the author(s) were probably more
intent on contrasting the Creator with the creation and providing a
response to the Babylonian philosophies of the day.

(I tend to follow the Wesleyan view of the nature of the Bible -- that
it is a collection of documents written by human hands about the
things that they saw God do (or were told about by others); that the
Bible provides enough information about Christianity that one can
become a Christian by reading it. Therefore, there is no reason to
expect the Bible to be true in every last detail -- mistakes could
have occurred in the original writing, the relaying and subsequent
translations. But experience has shown us that in spiritual matters
the Bible has generally been helpful. This Wesleyan view of scripture
is almost tautological -- there is little that one could disagree with
-- and is different to (say) the southern baptist or fundamentalist
view which is to say that the Bible is the dictated Word of God, and
that a perfect God doesn't make mistakes, thus making scripture
inerrant. This leads to vast efforts explaining away a tentative value
of pi=3, Judas dying simultaneously in two different ways, and Jesus
dying at two different times.  Perschbacher wrote a magnum opus
reconciling these various problems (and many others). The quantity of
paper sacrificed in this effort did more to persuade me to the
Wesleyan view (the opposite of Perschbacher's) than any amount of
spiritual reflection and study on the matter myself!)

Getting back to the evolution of humanity, it's worth contemplating
that evolution depends heavily on free will and choice. There a few
decisions we believe we take more freely than our choice of partner!

So while an all-knowing and all-powerful God is quite capable of
setting up the initial conditions of the universe and its physical
laws so that a planet called Earth orbits a sun called Sol in an outer
spiral of a galaxy, some 18 billion years after the beginning of the
universe (and could have planned it so that the meteor some 65 million
years ago could have struck the Earth), it is not clear to me that a
God who allows free will would have chosen also to dictate the path
that evolution would take by forcing particularly sets of our
ancestors to mate.

It seems to me that when Paul says God works all things for good with
those that love him, God must have had all the eventual possibilities
of life on earth in mind as the universe was created. A few small
changes of partner and a few different decisions about what to eat,
and perhaps homo sapiens might never have existed. We might have had
God come to Earth in the form of some other dominant lifeform ("and if
your right tusk doesn't know what you're left tusk is doing").

To the ancients, a God who stood above the sky, ruled the *whole
world* and let the rain fall from the sky would have seemed
monumentally huge and powerful. Just thinking about it would surely
have had them falling to their knees in wonder that such a huge God
would be personally interested in them.

But several thousand years later, we now know more. God must have
waited billions of years for you to be born; God must have known which
of the uncountably many different ways that life could have formed was
the one that could create the unique creature that is you; God must
have watched every quark in every atom in every molecule in every puff
of gas in every current in every eddy in every spot in every star in
every galaxy in every supercluster across all time and *didn't even
need to intervene* to control them all to His ends since He knew what
they would all do even before creating the universe. This is the God
who watched over tens of thousands of generations of proto-humans
waiting patiently until they were able to talk, to wonder about their
creator, and to interact with each other. This is the God that didn't
even need to shepherd the continents together to form the unique
conditions that led to the creation of ancient Mesopotamia. This is
the God who chose to become one of the multitude of sentient and
intelligent lifeforms that could have been and to be executed by the
them. This is the God who can cause every piece of matter in the
universe to spontaneously decay in the very next moment, and who asks
politely to be acknowledged.

Can we do anything other than fall on our knees and say "o my God!" as
we learn through science how much greater he must be that we had ever
imagined?