I think this is a new category for my CV — “articles subjected to close reading by creationists.” (That, and pioneering the concept of the least bloggable unit.) Here is the first entry: my humble little essay for Nature entitled “Is Our Universe Natural?” has been lovingly dissected at “Creation-Evolution Headlines.” In which they claim that my paper “arms the intelligent design movement in the current fight over the definition of science.” Okay, now those are fighting words.
The page is part of a larger site called Creation Safaris. I would tell you more about the site if only their web pages weren’t so confusing that I can’t follow what’s going on. It seems to be one of those places that takes you on a rafting trip to better enjoy God’s creation; blurbs for the trips include stuff like this:
ABOUT YOUR GUIDE: Tom Vail is a veteran rafting guide with 24 years experience. In recent years he has led the big trips for ICR and Answers in Genesis. Formerly an evolutionist, he used to tell his rafting parties the usual millions-of-years stories about the canyon, but when he became a Christian, he began to look at the world differently: this led to the publication last year of his book Grand Canyon: A Different View that caused a firestorm among evolutionists when the National Park Service began selling it in its bookstores; fortunately, visitors to the park are voting for it with their dollars!
Hey look, they’re the ones saying that becoming a Christian persuaded poor Tom to give up on rational scientific thought, not me. I’m not sure what belief system is responsible for the run-on sentences.
The most impressive thing about the site is that they have the massive cojones necessary to favorably invoke Carl Sagan, of all people. In particular, Sagan’s notion of a baloney detector, which apparently is just a “good grasp of logical reasoning and investigative procedure.” Which they use, ahem, to counter the illogical rhetorical sneakiness of the pro-evolution crowd. Jiminy crickets.
Anyway. Somehow they found my Nature article, which was about how physicists are taking advantage of seemingly-unnatural features of our universe in their efforts to develop a deeper understanding how how nature works. The title, “Is Our Universe Natural?”, is of course a joke, which folks of a certain cast of mind apparently don’t get. Of course our universe is natural, more or less by definition. The point is that it doesn’t always look natural from the perspective of our current state of understanding. That’s no surprise, because our current understanding is necessarily incomplete. In fact, it’s good news for scientists when they can point to something that doesn’t seem “natural” about the universe; although it’s not as useful as a direct experimental result that can’t be explained by current theories, it can still provide some useful guidance while we develop better theories. Trying to understand the rarity of certain particle-physics decays inspired people to invent the concept of “strangeness,” and ultimately the Eight-Fold Way and the quark model. Trying to understand the flatness and smoothness of our universe on large scales inspired Alan Guth to invent inflation, which provided a dynamical mechanism to generate density perturbations purely as a bonus.
Right now, trying to understand hierarchies in particle physics and the arrow of time has led people to seriously contemplate a vast multiverse beyond what we can see, perhaps populated by regions occupying different phases in the string theory landscape. Wildly speculative, of course, but that’s to be expected of, you know, speculations. Ideas are always speculative when they are new and untested; either they will ultimately be tested one way or another, or they’ll fade into obscurity, as I made perfectly clear.
The ultimate goal is undoubtedly ambitious: to construct a theory that has definite consequences for the structure of the multiverse, such that this structure provides an explanation for how the observed features of our local domain can arise naturally, and that the same theory makes predictions that can be directly tested through laboratory experiments and astrophysical observations. To claim success in this programme, we will need to extend our theoretical understanding of cosmology and quantum gravity considerably, both to make testable predictions and to verify that some sort of multiverse picture really is a necessary consequence of these ideas. Only further investigation will allow us to tell whether such a programme represents laudable aspiration or misguided hubris.
(Did you know that Nature has an editorial policy forbidding the use of the words “scenario” and “paradigm”? Neither did I, but it’s true. “Paradigm” I can see, but banning “scenario” seems unnecessarily stuffy to me.) (Also, it’s a British publication, thus the spelling of “programme.” There is no “me” in “program”!)
It’s not hard to guess what a creationist would make of this: scientists are stuck, don’t understand what’s going on, grasping at straws, refusing to admit that God did it, blah blah blah. And that’s more or less what we get:
For the most part, Carroll wrote thoughtfully and perceptively, except for one thing: he totally ignored theism as an option. He is like Robert Jastrow’s mountain climber, scrambling over the last highest peak, only to find a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Yet he doesn’t even bother to say Howdy. Instead, he walks over to them and tries to describe them with equations, and puzzles about how they emerged by a natural process. As he does this, one of the theologians taps on his head and says, “Hello? Anybody home?” yet Carroll continues, now trying to naturalize the pain he feels in his skull.
Gee, I wonder why anyone would waste their time trying to explain the universe in natural terms? Maybe because it’s been a fantastically successful strategy for the last five hundred years? Somewhat more successful, one might suggest, than anything “creation science” has managed to come up with.
Sorry, got a little sarcastic there. Don’t mean to offend anyone, even while they are tapping on my empty skull. What we have here is a textbook case of the God of the gaps argument, notwithstanding the thorough squelching that David Hume gave the idea many years ago. It’s really kind of sad. All they can do is point to something that scientists don’t yet understand and say “Aha! You’ll never understand that! Only God will provide the answer!” And when the scientists finally do understand it and move on to some other puzzle, they’ll say “Okay, this one you’ll really never understand! You need God, admit it!”
Think about it for a second — a century ago concepts like “the state of the universe one second after the Big Bang” or “the ratio of the vacuum energy to the Planck scale” hadn’t even been invented yet. Today, not only have they been invented, but they’ve been measured, and we’ve moved on to trying to understand them in terms of deeper principles. I’d say it’s a bit to early to declare defeat in our attempts to fit these ideas into a naturalistic framework.
Creationists don’t understand how science works. But more amusingly, they also don’t understand the definition of the word “faith”! The Creation-Safaris article pulls out the hoary old chestnut that science requires just as much faith as religion does.
The introduction also hints that the naturalistic approach is built on faith. Scientists believe that even in the most puzzling phenomena there exist underlying physical or natural principles accessible to the human mind. … It takes faith, however, to believe this approach can be extrapolated without bounds.
Let’s look up the dictionary definition of faith:
- Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
- Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.
The thing is, scientists don’t have “faith” that the universe can be explained in naturalistic terms; they make that hypothesis, and then they test it. And it works, over and over again — it becomes a belief that very much does “rest on logical proof or material evidence.” In my Nature article I said “Needless to say, proposals of this type are extremely speculative, and may well be completely wrong,” which is seized upon as an admission of weakness. That couldn’t be further from the truth; it’s just standard operating procedure for scientists to admit that their theories may well be wrong before they’ve been tested against data. The provisional nature of scientific theorizing, admitting ignorance where appropriate, is the strength of the scientific method.
Nor is it true that I “totally ignored theism as an option.” I didn’t discuss it in this particular paper, of course, just as I didn’t discuss the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Elsewhere I have argued in detail why theism is simply not a very good option, in the specific case of trying to understand the apparent fine-tunings we see in nature. (And don’t tell me that no serious theologian tries to use fine-tunings to argue in favor of God these days, because they do.) But I will explain it once again! Because, despite the absence of God in my cold materialist heart, I am nevertheless a very generous person.
When scientists compare hypotheses that purport to explain the same set of data, they tend to prefer the model that explains the most with the least; that is, the one that can account for the widest variety of phenomena with the smallest amount of input. In this case, the phenomena to be explained include certain large-scale features of the universe (the existence of many galaxies, the arrow of time) as well as the values of various constants of nature that seem to be crucial to the existence of chemistry (and therefore life) as we know it. The claim of modern-day natural theology is that the God hypothesis provides a simple and elegant explanation of features of the universe that would otherwise seem disconnected and unnatural — it’s much easier to say “God exists,” and from that derive the conditions necessary for the existence of life, than to separately posit each of those conditions.
Except that (1) the God hypothesis is anything but simple, and (2) you don’t derive very much from it at all. It’s not simple because nobody will tell you much about this God character. What is its origin, how does it behave, what laws does it obey? Of course some people think they know the answers, but those people don’t generally agree with each other. Rather than offering a simple and well-defined hypothesis, we’ve been forced to invent an entirely new metaphysical category and an ill-defined set of rules for it to follow.
And you don’t go from “God exists” directly to a prediction for the vacuum energy or the charge of the electron. You go (in the most generous of readings) from “God exists” to “conditions in the universe must allow for the existence of life” to the values of various constants. But that first step buys you precisely nothing. The only thing that the God hypothesis even purports to explain is why the universe allows for intelligent life. But the statement “the universe allows for intelligent life” contains just as much predictive power, with much less metaphysical baggage, than the God idea. So, strictly from the perspective of scientific theory-choice, there’s absolutely nothing to be gained (and much to be lost in terms of specificity and simplicity) by giving the credit to God.
As I like to emphasize, the God hypothesis could in principle count as a scientifically promising explanation, if only it could actually explain something new, something beyond our mere existence. For example, it’s unclear why there are three generations of fermions in the Standard Model; can God perhaps account for that? Even better, make a testable prediction. Does God favor low-energy supersymmetry? What is God’s stance on proton decay, and baryognesis? If you are claiming to explain some features of known particle physics or cosmology by appeal to God (and maybe you aren’t claiming that, but some people are), you should be able to carry the program forward and make predictions about unknown particle physics. Otherwise you are just telling a story about stuff we already know, without explaining anything, and that’s not science.
The true tragedy of “creation science” is that it is an invitation to stop thinking. Instead of taking puzzling aspects of Nature as clues to something deeper, and mulling over the possible lessons we can learn from them in our quest to undertand the universe better and better, the creationist attitude just wants to say “God did it!” and declare victory. It’s a form of giving-up that could have been invoked thousands of times in the history of science, but thankfully was not. Instead, stubborn naturalistic investigators took seriously the clues they had, and used them to gradually uncover marvelous new features of the real world. And that’s what we’ll continue to do.
Comments
63 responses to “Rapped on the Head by Creationists”
this is not the best news:
http://lippard.blogspot.com/2006/08/us-acceptance-of-evolution-ranks-us-33.html
Jim,
it is disingenuous in the highest degree to lump religious belief in with the commonsensical assumptions needed to do science
I apologize for being disingenuous. I would prefer you to think of me as confused. I am still young and foolish, but I should probably know better.
Religious belief is sui generis since its content is relentlessly counterfactual. People aren’t immortal. The universe isn’t haunted . The dead stay dead. Prayer has at most a psychological efficacy.
Completely accurate but not an argument against what I said. If the goal of belief (as is my own goal and I’m sure is yours) is to be accurate, then these would be deadly flaws. When there is a pragmatic situation at hand- like education policy or space policy- there is a very good reason to be accurate. When someone is dealing with their personal life, I don’t know of a convincing argument that accuracy should be their goal (despite having a personal conviction that deluding myself would be a bad thing). Also, this is not all mutually exclusive. I can set different goals in answering different questions. When pondering physics or math, I can apply the very well motivated “commensensical” assumptions required of these fields. When I ponder things like my reason for being, perhaps you will permit me to be a little more hokey. Maybe pondering these things is just silly, but in this context, it does no harm.
You can also accuse me of being off topic because these scientific-religious debates are about pragmatic questions where convincing arguments for science do exist. There you would be right. I don’t mean to discount science’s successes or its superiority in resolving the vast majority of debates. If it means anything, I may yet be a physics major, and I would generally be considered an athiest and certainly don’t believe in the things you cited as religious (immortality, ghosts, resurrection, effectiveness of prayer beyond the psychological). I just think caution may be called for. Sometimes things that are “at most psychological” are very, very important to people and sometimes that is enough to make them worthwhile. Science has proven itself enough in the minds of enough people that we don’t need to trample over religion. A cultural war is not what we need because if people are pushed hard enough, then science is in actual danger.
Lest you think I am just incapable of hearing reason, I hasten to add that perfectly sensible things can be said that actually do address the argument I made- as John Baez and David Corfield demonstrate in comments here. I would greatly appreciate discussing this more in that thread or in this one.
John–
I wasn’t addressing your post so much as the general argument that since science requires assumptions (faith, sorta), it resembles popular religion. I wasn’t attacking religous people, who are welcome to whatever they wish to believe and are guaranteed to be unimpressed with my arguments in any event. I’m simply trying to understand how religion and science work. Like every attempt to come to the truth (small t), it is very much a minority endeavor. You write “When someone is dealing with their personal life, I don’t know of a convincing argument that accuracy should be their goal.” I completely agree.
Ah. Sorry about the misinterpretation and over-defensiveness. Sometimes this area is just too touchy.
[…] Physicist Sean Carroll’s Cosmic Variance spoofs the high state of terror alert presently being accorded to liquids. Rapped on the Head by Creationists is a devastating and hilarious indictment of the whole “intelligent design” movement, worth quoting: […]
I personally believe in God and the creationist theory that God made the earth and all that but I also believe in evolution and the whole primortial earth thing also. First of all, if the big bang theory is true, where did the matter for the big bang come from and what caused it. Because the four fundamental forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces the electromagnetic force and gravitation; they would eventually reach an equilibrium and the big bang would not happen. So some outside force had to cause it to go boom. Also in Genesis, God made man and everything in seven days, but you have to remember God is outside of time, seven days to him could be well over 50 billion years to us. And what did he make before he made the animals. He made the earth and then he could let natural processes take over. Then he made the animals, the dinosaurs and all that. They die, and he makes human, and there is no proof that Adam and Eve had to have looked like us, thats just in art. Even if they did they were cast out of Eden, therefore God could have punished them by making them into neanderthals.
A Recommendation
OK, I usually don’t do this, but I just had a great blogosphere moment and thought I’d share. While checking the recent comments on my Café Scientifique: Season Two post, I came across a contribution by Allyson.
Now, as it turns out, All…
[…] But then, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much else besides. Believers haven’t given up entirely; you’ll now more commonly find the argument from design placed in a cosmological context, where it is even less convincing. But for the most part, theologians have given up on “proving” God’s existence altogether, which is probably a good move. […]
[…] But then, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much else besides. Believers haven’t given up entirely; you’ll now more commonly find the argument from design placed in a cosmological context, where it is even less convincing. But for the most part, theologians have basically abandoned the project of “proving” God’s existence, which is probably a good move. […]
[…] 回覆: The God Conundrum For the past two thousand years, theology has struggled to reconcile these two apparently-conflicting conceptions of the divine, without much success. We are left with fundamentally incoherent descriptions of what God is, which deny that he 「exists〠in the same sense that hummingbirds and saxophones do, but nevertheless attribute to him qualities of 「love〠and 「creativity〠that conventionally belong to conscious individual beings. One might argue that it’s simply a hard problem, and our understanding is incomplete; after all, we haven’t come up with a fully satisfactory way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, either. But there is a more likely possibility: there simply is no reconciliation to be had. The reason why it’s difficult to imagine how God can be eternally perfect and also occasionally wistful is that God doesn’t exist. In fact, in this day and age the flaws in Aristotle’s cosmological proof (just to pick one) are perfectly clear. Our understanding of the inner workings of the physical world has advanced quite a bit since the ancient Greeks. Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force. Except that, once we have made this breakthrough, we realize that the matter doesn’t want to do anything — it just does it. Modern physics doesn’t describe the world in terms of 「causes〠and 「effects.〠It simply posits that matter (in the form of quantum fields, or strings, or what have you) acts in accordance with certain dynamical laws, known as 「equations of motion.〠The notion of 「causality〠is downgraded from 「when I see B happening, I know it must be because of A〠to 「given some well-defined and suitably complete set of information about the initial state of a system, I can use the equations of motion to determine its subsequent evolution.〠But a concept like 「cause〠doesn’t appear anywhere in the equations of motion themselves, nor in the specification of the type of matter being described; it is only an occasionally-appropriate approximation, useful to us humans in narrating the behavior of some macroscopic configuration of equation-obeying matter. In other words, the universe runs all by itself. The planets orbit the Sun, not because anything is 「causing〠them to do so, but because that’s the kind of behavior that obeys Newton’s (or Einstein’s) equations governing motion in the presence of gravity. Deeply embedded as we are in this Galilean/Newtonian framework, statements like 「every effect has a cause〠become simply meaningless. (We won’t even bother with 「A causal chain cannot be of infinite length,〠which completely begs the question.) Conservation of momentum completely undermines any force the cosmological argument might ever have had. The universe, like everything in it, can very well just be, as long as its pieces continue to obey the relevant equations of motion. Special pleading that the universe is essentially different from its constituents, and (by nature of its unique status as all that there is to the physical world) that it could not have either (1) just existed forever, nor (2) come spontaneously into existence all by itself, is groundless. The only sensible response such skepticism is 「Why not?〠It’s certainly true that we don’t yet know whether the universe is eternal or whether it had a beginning, and we certainly don’t understand the details of its origin. But there is absolutely no obstacle to our eventually figuring those things out, given what we already understand about physics. General relativity asserts that spacetime itself is dynamical; it can change with time, and potentially even be created from nothing, in a way that is fundamentally different from the Newtonian conception (much less the Aristotelian). And quantum mechanics describes the universe in terms of a wavefunction that assigns amplitudes to any of an infinite number of possibilities, including — crucially — spontaneous transitions, unforced by any cause. We don’t yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will — physicists are working on the problem every day. The analogy to a penthouse apartment atop a high-rise building is quite apt. Much of the intricate architecture of modern theology is built on a foundation that conceives of God as both creator and sustainer of the world and as a friendly and loving being. But these days we know better. The Clockwork Universe of Galileo and Newton has once and for all removed the need for anything to 「sustain〠the universe, and the 「creation〠bit is something on which we are presently closing in. In fact, although it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident. One response was a revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which claimed that it was simply wrong even to attempt to apply logic and rationality to questions of religion — claiming that you had 「proven〠the existence of God could get you accused of atheism. The other, more robust response, was a turn to natural theology and the argument from design. Even if the universe could keep going all by itself, surely its unguided meanderings would never produce something as wonderfully intricate as (for example) the human eye? The argument doesn’t hold up very well even under purely philosophical scrutiny — David Hume’s devastating take-down in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, interestingly, actually pre-dates William Paley’s classic statement of the argument (1779 vs. 1802). Hume, for example, points out that, even if the argument from design works, it allows us to conclude next to nothing about the nature of the Designer. Maybe it was a team? Maybe our universe is a rough first draft for a much better later universe? Or even just a mistake? (Okay, that has something going for it.) But then, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much else besides. Believers haven’t given up entirely; you’ll now more commonly find the argument from design placed in a cosmological context, where it is even less convincing. But for the most part, theologians have basically abandoned the project of 「proving〠God’s existence, which is probably a good move. But they haven’t given up on believing in God’s existence (suitably defined), which is what drives atheists like Dawkins (and me) a little crazy. Two thousand years ago, believing in God made perfect sense; there was so much that we didn’t understand about the world, and an appeal to the divine seemed to help explain the otherwise inexplicable. Those original motivations have long since evaporated. In response, theologians have continued to alter what they mean by 「God,〠and struggled to reconcile the notion’s apparent internal contradictions — unwilling to take those contradictions as a signal of the fundamental incoherence of the idea. To be fair, much of Dawkins’s book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God means. That’s not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after
all, that kind of naive theology is a guiding force among a very large and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn’t save God from the dustbin of intellectual history. The universe is going to keep existing without any help, peacefully solving its equations of motion along the way; if we want to find meaning through compassion and love, we have to create it ourselves. […]
[…] Rapped on the Head by Creationists […]
[…] Now, as it turns out, Allyson has commented on Cosmic Variance before, but I hadn’t noticed. In particular, she had fun things to say following Sean’s Rapped on the Head by Creationists post. […]