Science and religion both have very particular ideas about how the world works.
Ideas that potentially are not totally compatible but that are overlapping.
Science claims to be a system that can discover absolutely anything that is totally comprehensive.
Religion also claims a comprehensiveness that is based in reality where God, whatever that
deity may be, is absolutely real, maybe even more real than anything or anyone else.
So I got to thinking that perhaps these two systems needed to find a way to talk to each
other or at least to cross paths.
And to do that I took as the basis of a sort of a thought experiment, central believes
from each of the two systems that seems on the surface to be completely incompatible.
Namely I took God to be as literally real as you and I, as a building, a dog, a cat
anything else.
And I took science at its word that it could learn everything about everything about anything
that was real, anything that had any substance in the world.
To do that I decided that I would attempt to scientifically figure out where on the
phylogenetic tree, which is the master map of all the species on earth, where you might
put God.
What species is God?
That was a question that I asked myself.
And then I had to find a way to address it scientifically.
So science has many different ways in which you can pursue such a question.
Probably the most obvious would be to obtain DNA for God but I couldn't get my hands on
that.
So another possibility I realized was to attempt to genetically engineered God in a laboratory.
And so I found collaborators at UC Berkeley and several other institutions who are willing
to help me through that process using something known as Continuous in Vitro Evolution.
Which essentially is an accelerated and directed version of natural selection in which you
apply environmental pressures on a given population of an organism in such a way that you favor
certain random mutations over others and you sort of force Darwin's hand.
You put evolution in one direction versus another.
It works very well for instance if we're talking about bacteria making them better able to
absorb oil spills for instance.
But nobody had ever tried this in terms of attempting to genetically engineered God.
So I set up my experiment and saw where it went.
I took two different candidate species, two species that were based on the best source
material that I could find, the Bible for instance and various other religious tracks
that on the one hand tell us that God came first and on the other hand that told us that
God created man in his image.
So it seemed that I should look to the earliest extant species, which are cyanobacteria on
the one hand and I should like to humans on the other.
Well humans are very difficult to work with in the laboratory over multiple generations
so I worked with essentially a surrogate that was more or less the same when you look at
the whole phylogenetic tree, which are fruit flies.
So over the course of seven days and nights, the standard biblical period of time, I used
Continues in Vitro Evolution in which my environmental pressure was prayer.
I figured that since people are always praying to God maybe there is some way in which God
metabolizes worship.
So I took leading prayers for each of the major monotheistic religions and as a control
group I used exclusively talk radio.
So over seven days and nights I ran the experiment.
And then I looked for one of the qualities that is often associated with godliness as
a way of measuring these two different species against each other in terms of their incipient
godliness.
That is that God is supposed to be omnipresent, which essentially sounds to me like rampant
population growth.
So I did population growth studies on both cyanobacteria and fruit flies, statistically
adjusted according to their replication rate and various other factors in order to keep
this absolutely scientifically on the up and up.
And finally was able to publish my research in which I discover according to these two
very preliminary pilot studies that God is more closely related, phylogenetically speaking,
to bacteria then to us.
This is just the basis of course for many future experiments that I hope others will
undertake having read this research and having figured out far better or certainly different
methodologies for pursuing this sort of question.
Science and religion are considered by many, especially those who are adherents of one
or the other, to be incompatible systems, systems that are reconcilable and therefore
that those who are the other side have to be converted.
I don't think that that's necessarily the case.
And so I was interested in this project, in this thought experiment in trying to figure
out whether there is a way in which these incompatible systems could coexist in a way
that they could each inform the other and could result in a broader understanding.
Perhaps one that was more tolerant, certainly one that was more encompassing of beliefs
that come over vast periods of time are highly developed and are essential to the way in
which our world works.
So I looked to both science and religion for certain core qualities.
Religion tells us certain things about the nature of the universe.
Science tells us certain ways to explore the universe.
So what happens if we take the scientific method and we apply it to the religious realm
that tells us certain baseline facts?
We end up I think in an interesting place.
One in which the scientific method doesn't any longer seem to be so absolutely all-encompassing.
That is to say that perhaps science can be a little bit less arrogant.
On the other hand I think that religion is shown through a process such as this to maybe
take a little bit too much on faith.
Is there a way in which the received wisdom of religion cannot be so rapidly and so uncritically
received?
So I'm not interested in converting anyone from one system to another.
But rather in finding a way in which each system, by way of delving into the other and
learning from the other, can become a better stronger system.
A more satisfying and satisfactory one and one also that is capable of coexisting with
the other in a way that is at peace because we're never going to convert everyone if we
haven't already from science to religion or vice versa.
So we need to find ways in which these systems can communicate with each other with do respect
for what makes each system its own.
The God Project is an attempt at achieving that.
By no means perfect but I think more broadly suggestive of a way in which any two or three
or potentially more systems can potentially be brought into some sort of tentative alignment.
And also can be strengthened through that process.
You can't get through life, even through the day without coming upon incompatible systems.
Simply is the way of the world when the world comes complex as ours is that systems are
not worked out to work together.
There often is a lot of thought that goes into each system but they don't naturally
communicate because they probably come from different places and they serve different
purposes.
Yet you need to be able to negotiate all of this in terms of trying to resolve some sort
of a personal problem or in terms of trying to take on some new venture in the workplace.
These systems are in place and they can't be changed, they can't be supplanted but have
to be worked with.
So I think that as I try to do, in the case of the God Project, I think that you can take
systems for what they are and you can find ways in which on the surface they are incompatible.
And you can put them together and try out combinations until you find some way that
doesn't necessarily make them consistent with each other but at least find some sort of
a common ground, some sort of a peace that can be reach where each one of them can be
true to itself and is not threatened.
And yet both of them or all of them can work together in a way that, symbiotically in a
way that collectively they lead to something that is stronger for you and is more broadly,
is more broadly applicable to everybody else.