A couple of thousand years ago, we didn’t know much about how the universe works. It’s no surprise that our ancestors came up with a mishmash of beliefs about nature, humans, and our place in the cosmos.
What is a consistent source of surprise is that so many people still cling to these dusty beliefs, no matter what variety of silliness it leads them to. One of the foundational beliefs of mainstream Western religions is that humans are somehow special in God’s eyes. Could anything shake us from such a conviction? Majikthise and Cynical-C point to one such thought experiment: a story from Catholic News Service about whether space aliens have souls. What would happen to our belief in our own singular status within creation if we found that there were other sentient beings out there, capable of thoughts and feelings and launching wars of choice?
Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno has thought about it, and reached an interesting conclusion: it wouldn’t change anything.
He said his aim with the booklet was to reassure Catholics “that you shouldn’t be afraid of these questions” and that “no matter what we learn, it doesn’t invalidate what we already know” and believe. In other words, scientific study and discovery and religion enrich one another, not cancel out each other.
If new forms of life were to be discovered or highly advanced beings from outer space were to touch down on planet Earth, it would not mean “everything we believe in is wrong,” rather, “we’re going to find out that everything is truer in ways we couldn’t even yet have imagined,” he said.
Not to be nit-picky, but the motto “no matter what we learn, it doesn’t invalidate what we already know” is not evidence that science and religion enrich each other, it is evidence of precisely the opposite. The distinguishing feature of science is precisely that it stands ready to invalidate its previous theories on the basis of new evidence. We approach the universe with an open mind, struggling to understand what it has to tell us; we don’t figure things out ahead of time and use the universe to fabricate a flattering story about ourselves.
But the next sentence was my favorite:
The Book of Genesis describes two stories of creation, and science, too, has more than one version of how the cosmos may have come into being.
That’s a tad misleading right there. Genesis does indeed have two stories of creation, one right after the other (the first starts at Genesis 1:1, the second at Genesis 2:4). The two versions are completely contradictory — in the first, God creates plants, and then animals, and then man and woman simultaneously; in the second, God creates man out of dust, then plants a garden, and woman is only an afterthought. And everyone knows why there are two mutually exclusive stories right after each other: they came from two different texts, written by different people at different times, edited together later into a single document. Fascinating as history, but not a stable foundation on which to build a view of the universe.
Scientists, it’s true, have lots of versions of how the cosmos may have come into being; heck, I have one myself. That’s how we work; we throw ideas out there, compare them to other pieces of information, and toss out the ones that don’t work. If new information comes along, we’re hoping that it conforms to our personally favorite ideas, but if not, that’s exciting and we look forward to learning something.
And when those space aliens get here, I’m definitely going to ask them what they think about the anthropic principle.
That’s what we have now, and that is why we will fail as a species if we continue the way we are going.
More detatchment from the process… the anthropic principle indicates that we cannot violate the natural evolution of the ecosystem that we are contributing members of without putting ourselves above nature.
And the evidence sure doesn’t support either arrogant assumption that’s commonly made by “free-thinkers” and tree-hugger extremists alike… TOO alike.
A view from the bleachers-
Since, it has been reported, that there are trillions of bacteria in our gut alone, and that we have a symbiotic relationship with these bacteria, and that they have existed in one form or another in our gut throughout evolution…is it possible that we are just the hosts to these bacteria and not really worthy of any of the positions postulated above?
It would seem that, if we as humans do have a soul, then that soul must exist in every cell in our body…since there are more bacterial cells in our gut alone than there are in the rest of our body, and if they too could have a soul….well, you see where this is going
It seems you’re applying an overly religious take on the anthropic principle. I had taken it that the principle states “of course the universe is set up to support life because if it wasn’t, life wouldn’t be here to ask why it was so.” Note that I do not use the words “set up” to indicate an agent, but rather why the various forces interacted in a way that mass held together well (if the charge of the electron was even slightly different all atoms would break apart, I think), all the various temperatures we needed existed (the “sweet spot” the earth inhabits) etc, etc.
Given this rather mechanical version of the question, it doesn’t matter how many alien species exist, they must by definition agree with the principle (granted a word besdes “anthropic” would be needed) because it is equally true for all life. If matter could not hold together or if gravity was too strong or space in general been very curved instead of flat so that the universe would have rapidly recontracted, no life would exist. Only the precise balance of forces has allowed the universe to exist in this way. This, by the way is not from the Bible which I am not versed in, but from Hawking.
It is very sad, that so many well educated people have nothing better to do than beat up on each others perception of reality, or lack thereof. To address a comment concerning Genisis, while there are two accounts of creation, it is clear through study that the first mention is that of a plan to create and the second is the carrying out of the plan. It is my hope that in the future , all of you learned individuals will get back to the basics of living here on earth . I believe that if you brilliant minds can understand and elaborate on quantum physics that you can surly come up with a cure for disease, homelessness, and war.
“To address a comment concerning Genisis, while there are two accounts of creation, it is clear through study that the first mention is that of a plan to create and the second is the carrying out of the plan.”
Well… that’s a new one, for me. It’s amazing what leaps we can make to come up with explanations that will allow us to keep our preconceived beliefs intact. For many it will not matter what history shows, what the evidence proves… if it is counter to their religious beliefs, they will either ignore it or come up with their own explanations. Of course, I would request evidence for this assumption, but I doubt it would be based on anything but more assumptions.
If you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God, you don’t believe in a God that requires a pre-planned blueprint. And, even if God did require it, it would be perfect and the resulting action would follow that plan exactly. Not to mention, God would know exactly what the result of that creation would be… the supposed “fall” would have to be part of that plan. However, that is a purely religious debate… It’s difficult to match religion with logic.
Krista
Woody: Given thousands of years of dispute over of the meaning of the scriptures, it’s nonsensical to say that any interpretation of a Biblical passage is “clear.”
I like the idea that God had to make a rough outline, and then re-arranged things in the finished product. But that’s not there in the text, no matter how carefully you study it. And doesn’t affect the fact that it’s two different stories strung together by a later editor.
“And doesn’t affect the fact that it’s two different stories strung together by a later editor”
Sean, it is good that we have someone to distill centuries of debate on this text and let us know what the facts are. Is humility and the relentless pursuit of knowledge officially incompatible?
Magical Thinking and Origins
(rebuttal to DIVOKHAN)
For many, many years, Magical Thinking has controlled our ideas on how life on Earth began. Before the concept of Magic Evolution became politically correct, most people believed that a Magic God who spoke Magic Words was responsible for everything around us. Magic God spoke, and “POOF!”, massive or complex things instantaneously appeared or processes happened.
When Magic Evolution became our intolerant master, proponents of Magic Creation were scorned and ridiculed and rendered institutionally disadvantaged for believing in a Magic God who could make anything just by speaking Magic Words. Although Magic Evolution, too, could conjure complex, self-replicating life forms out of just a few chemicals, of its own accord and with no known controlling mechanism, it called itself Science and insisted Magic Creation was Religion only, disconnected with Science.
Magic Creation fought back, though, pointing out the problems with Magic Evolution and showing that Earth’s geology and Fossil Record could also be interpreted by Magic Creation. Magic Creation pointed out the record of massive Sudden Death in the Fossil Record as evidence for a Worldwide Flood. Magic Evolution interpreted it as an explosion of Sudden Life.
Magic Creation insisted that all Life was created in basic categories, able to reproduce itself, but only within these categories. Although all life forms were created to adapt to changing conditions, they were unable to cross over into different categories. Magic Evolution insisted that all Life descended from a single, primitive cell that assembled itself from raw materials in such a way that it could reproduce itself. Its descendents mutated, mutated again, and continued to mutate until the whole world was filled with complex and diverse life forms, all related to the First Mother/Father Cell. Magic Evolution said that lizards turned into birds and whales crawled up out of the sea to become land animals.
Although both accounts of Origins sound preposterous, the battle lines were drawn, and it was a fight to the death. Magic Evolution gained control of the education system, indoctrinated the children, often embraced fraudulent evidence as Truth, and denounced any alternative thinking as Religion. Magic Creation fought back, publicizing the loopholes and improbabilities in Magic Evolution, pointing out the frauds and hoaxes. Genetic reshuffling resulting in different colors or sizes of an animal or plant is a common occurrence, they argued, but self-synthesis of completely new DNA codes resulting in new functions has never been observed.
Magic Evolution couldn’t demonstrate how life created itself, Magic Creation couldn’t demonstrate there was a Magic God. The War of Origins was a stalemate.
The Law of Cause and Effect
The universe we know operates on the Law of Cause and Effect. If we see an Effect, we know that something caused it. If we initiate a Cause, we know an Effect will follow, perhaps imperceptibly, perhaps a little later, but always, there will be an Effect.
Science is the attempt to understand Causes and Effects. Once they’re understood, others can perform the same Cause and observe the same Effect. This is Experimental Science. Experiments can be performed to prove whether a Scientific Idea is True or False.
Theoretical Science is the attempt to explain Causes or Effects that are undergoing testing, or can’t be tested at all. Magic Evolution cannot be tested because we cannot travel back in time to observe it, and we cannot demonstrate it in a laboratory experiment. If Magic Evolution could demonstrate an experiment in which a DNA molecule created itself out of a solution of simple chemicals, then reproduced itself, then Magic Evolution would become simply, Evolution, the Truth. Anyone could reproduce the experiment and achieve the same results. There could be no other alternatives.
In the same way, Magic Creation can’t be tested, because we cannot travel back in time to observe it. If we could obtain absolute proof that it was true, perhaps by face-to-face public contact with one or more of God’s representatives, then Magic Evolution must be discarded.
By misinterpreting the Ancient Writings, Magic God Believers ignore the Law of Cause and Effect and cast contempt on Religion. They think that Magic God spoke, and it happened, because Magic Words are sufficient to be the Cause. Understood correctly, a powerful being, not Magic God, ordered the surface of the Earth to be altered to make it suitable for life, then ordered his subordinates to complete the synthesis of life, using highly advanced technology. God (we don’t know his real name), the powerful leader of an extraterrestrial civilization, gave the orders, others carried them out. To our dwarfish Earthminds, this feat of planetary landscaping and creation of life might seem farfetched, but to an ancient, highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization, it would be child’s play. They’ve done it before…
It took technology to create life, not spontaneous generation of life from non-life, not miracles. There are no such thing as “miracles”, only Effects we cannot explain with our limited understanding of the universe and the forces it contains. It took highly advanced technology to write and assemble the codes of life into a wide range of living, functioning creatures capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions. If you believe life created itself, then you, too, believe in miracles.
So then, we really have two major possibilities on Origins: Life created itself, or, Life was brought here or assembled here by Extraterrestrials who went somewhere else, afterwards. It’s not so much the evidence we see, but what we want to believe that makes us either Evolutionist or Creationist. Both require Faith, Faith in what seems Impossible. Neither have hard scientific proof. Neither can be proven experimentally. We just believe. What we see in geology and the fossil record is colored by what we believe. To some, a few teeth and a jawbone becomes a grunting, stooped-over half-ape, half-human, covered with thick hair…
Some Evolutionists delight in insulting Creationists and deriding them and their qualifications with mean-spirited invective, when they themselves lack the ability to respond with logical proofs based on hard science. Some Creationists, whose God is some fuzzy, luminous nebulosity, located somewhere outside of creation, respond with religious jargon about sin and repentance and grace.
We can get our MBS degrees from BSU and be able to prove our opponents are all morons while we exult in our triumphs. We can spew religious jargon and state that if the Bible says anything we believe it to say, it’s true. What we all need is to experience the forgiveness and the kindness of the one human whose memories came from somewhere else. If he came today, as he did a few thousand years ago, we too, would kill him. Isn’t that what we do to aliens?
True Christianity will make us all softer, kinder people. It’s not connected very much to churches and religion.
Perhaps the Anthropic Principle explains why we find ourselves living in a civilization where people are susceptible to superstition. 🙂
You can imagine that biological creatures that are less susceptible to superstition develop their technologies faster than we do. At a certain point the biological creatures will be replaced by mchine intelligence.
So, one would expect that the total number of individual biological creatures that will ever live will be LESS in case of the less superstitious creatures. It is thus more typical for a biological creature to find him/herself in a ”backward” civilisation that evolves more slowly.
Maybe the anthropic principle can be applied to NHL Hockey as well. The fundamental parameters of the universe are fine tuned such that a bunch of men can put on skates and beat each other up with sticks while trying to hit a puck. Because if they were not tuned this way there could be no NHL Hockey. You can see why I think AP is just silliness.
Elliot
If we are to accept No tolerance for discrimmination of any kind, even reverse discrimmination, then this must apply “equally” to aliens?
this should extend to all circumstances
Thanks Lubos for your patience and putting up with my “altered” ego 🙂
Elliot: ”Maybe the anthropic principle can be applied to NHL Hockey as well. The fundamental parameters of the universe are fine tuned such that a bunch of men can put on skates and beat each other up with sticks while trying to hit a puck. Because if they were not tuned this way there could be no NHL Hockey. You can see why I think AP is just silliness.”
Well, I don’t see that that this is necessarily a problem. Only in single universe theories do you get tautologies. In a multiverse you can consider the fact that there exists places where unfortunate copies of you live that have to do without NHL Hockey.
You can, in principle, do statistics on the set of all your copies. This also means that you can’t use the argument that since we live in a single universe the rest of the multiverse isn’t relevant. That would only be true if you could pin yourself down at a single place in the multiverse. But you can’t because you have an infinite number of exact copies that live in possibly slightly different (unknow to you) circumstances.
One can imagine that a fundamental parameters are fine tuned to yield intelligent observers. But on a set of observers, you wouldn’t expect a strong correlations between fundamental parameters and various sports. If you change the fundamental parameters to get rid of NHL Hockey, then you very likely get rid of the observer as well.
OK lets work our way back. At what specific point can you define intelligent observers to have emerged. Are the ancient Greeks with their mythological explanations of the universe intelligent observers? Are early hominids? Dinosaurs? Astrologers? Do we need to wait for Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Hubble, or later before we are actually intelligent observers.
I realize the NHL example is a red herring but this “principle” is fraught with linguistic, logical issues and imprecision, that make it very hard for me to include it in my own conceptual category of real science.
Elliot
how can anyone who believes in the scientific method have any confidence in any form of relious dogma when science tells us that all of creation will evolve into emptiness and darkness in absolute zero with all processes ended? what will the gods be up to at the end of the universe? what were they up to before the big bang?
the bible tells us that god was lonely so the universe came into being. looks like god is in for some more alone time again. the a new universe will come into being.
so loneliness seems to be the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.
Elliot:
Well, in multiverse theories you could narrow down the definition of an observer to an exact copy of you. This is, in principle, well defined.
but if I were to suddenly die in one of the multiverses, would the anthropic constraints no longer apply? My fundamental point here is that if tomorrow an giant asteroid hit the earth wiping out human life. It would have absolutely no effect on the values of the dimensionless constants set billions prior. That would violate causality.
Elliot, first you need to define precisely what kind of multiverse we are talking about. Once you do that, you have fixed the ensemble of universes and the statistical distribution of the circumstances in which your copies live. Anthropic reasoning as used by Tegmark et al. just says that the prior probability of an observer finding himself in some universe is proportional to the prior probability of a universe multiplied by the probability of that universe giving rise to that observer.
There are some issues with normalization here, but this roughly the idea. If the multiverse contains only two universes A and B, which are intrinsically equally likely, but universe A had a billion times more Elliots than universe B, then Elliot would be billion times more likely to find himself in A.
After you die, the information that you had once lived is still there, so the constraints still apply. Information cannot be erased because that would violate unitary time evolution.