The book is Abrams’s way of attempting to spark a new conversation about the ultimate meaning of the universe, and to wrest away from the doctrinaire and dead certain voices on both sides of the God debate. Her approach is illustrated in the forewords that precede her book, contrasting meditations on her ideas by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the cosmologist Paul Davies.
Clearly, the Santa Cruz writer and philosopher of science – who will appear at Bookshop Santa Cruz March 24 – is coming to that debate from the science side. A lifelong atheist, she is married to pioneering astrophysicist Joel R. Primack – and has co-authored two books with her husband. But, just as clearly, she has lost patience with science-oriented atheists who reflexively dismiss all talk of God as superstition and delusion.
It was only through the struggle with an eating disorder that she began to rethink the idea of a higher power, and to subvert in her own mind the usual arguments that consume true believers and non-believers alike, such as whether God created humanity or vice versa. Even if the idea of a higher power sprang from the human mind, she argues, that doesn’t make God any less real.
“We humans have a certain need to envision who we could be,” she said, “and that need is aspirational. Scientists have been forever trying to discern how humans are unique from animals – that we have tools, that we walk upright, that we have language. It turns out animals can do all these things. It turns out what separates us is our aspirations. We have a vision of who we can be, and we want to change.”
Abrams comes at the question of God through the controversial idea of “emergence,” a relatively new idea that a system can be greater than the sum of its individual parts, that large systems and phenomena may have characteristics and behaviors that its individual components don’t have on their own.
“Look at the air in the room around you,” she said. “We can look at the individual molecules and determine what they are. But how do you account for temperature? Molecules don’t have temperature. That only emerges from the complexity and interaction of these various molecules.”
The book talks a good deal about the “double dark” theory of the universe, a subject in which her husband has devoted a large portion of his scientific career. That theory asserts that all but a tiny portion of the universe consists of two mysterious forces known as “dark matter” and “dark energy.” The double-dark theory, she said, serves as a useful analogy in thinking about God. If humanity’s sense of the nature of the cosmos only emerges one scientific theory at a time until a bigger picture emerges over time, then why can’t our understanding of God evolve in much the same manner?
“Once we understand that the idea of God is evolving,” she said, “it can take us to interesting places.” She remains critical of the way modern culture talks about spirituality calling it “incoherent,” as either professing things that science determines is nonsense, or ideas that are too vague to be meaningful. Why aren’t we putting our collective energies and intellectual power into figuring out a notion of God that exists in the natural world?
“Knowledge is a valuable thing,” she said. “Why would we not want to use it with the greatest question we know?”
