FORTUNATE THEN THAT THERE IS AN OBSERVER:

What Science and Theology Have in Common (B. Alan Wallace, January 24th, 2006, Quantum Biocommunication Technology)

How did organic molecules become living organisms? Evolution did it. How did consciousness first arise in living organisms? Evolution! Why do humans have such greater intelligence than other primates, far more than is needed to survive and procreate? Evolution is the cause. Here is a modern version of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.

Just as theists may attribute the orderliness and majesty of the natural world to God and Buddhists may explain such things in terms of karma, scientific materialists attribute everything to interactions of matter. With the advances of science in explaining natural phenomena, religious believers on the defensive have tried to provide divine explanations for scientific mysteries. Hence the phrase “God of the gaps.”

Now materialists have devised their own substitute — “materialism of the gaps” — to patch up the holes in the edifice of scientific understanding in such areas as the origins of life and consciousness in the universe. Everything, they assure us, can eventually be explained in terms of functions and emergent properties of physical processes.

Why should we take the leap of faith that the objective world, independent of human precepts and concepts, conforms to our human notion of “physical”? Even if it does, to which theory of matter does reality conform? In terms of Newtonian physics, a material body may be defined as a fraction of space endowed with constitutive properties such as impenetrability and mass. But these criteria are challenged by quantum mechanics, which undermines the primitive concept of matter as a collection of inherently massive and spatially defined particulate bodies.

The more closely we inspect the fundamental constituents of the physical world, the clearer it becomes that matter is not made out of “matter” but oscillations of immaterial abstract quantities in empty space. In other words, materialists fill the gaps in their knowledge with vacuous abstractions.

Moreover, one hypothesis in contemporary quantum theory is that without reference to an observer, the universe as a whole does not change in time. If this is true, the notion of evolution is not applicable to the universe as a whole without an external observer and without an external clock that does not belong to the universe.