Here is a Q&A interview with me in the LA Times, to which I link only reluctantly, as somehow they managed to take a picture that makes me look like I’m wearing a bad toupee. And a halo! So that’s a mixed bag.
The interview was spurred by the recent Scientific American article on the arrow of time, and most of the questions are pretty straightforward queries about entropy and cosmology. But at the end we veer into matters theological:
Does God exist in a multiverse?
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.
Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”
I’m not really surprised that people bring up God when asking about cosmology; the subjects are related, like it or not. But I really do want to separate out the science from the religion, so in the context of an interview about physics I’m reluctant to talk about the existence of God, and I haven’t really perfected an answer when the subject comes up.
Anyone who reads the blog might be surprised to hear that I don’t want to give people advice about their religious beliefs — I do it all the time! But context is crucial. This is our blog, and we write about whatever we’re interested in, and nobody is forced to read it. Likewise, if I’m invited to speak or write specifically about the subject of religion, I’m happy to be perfectly honest about my views. But in a context where the explicit subject is supposed to be science, I would rather not bring up God at all; not because I’m reluctant to say what I believe, but because it gives a false impression of how scientists actually think about science. God just doesn’t come up in the everyday activities of a working cosmologist.
This was the second recent incident when I was prodded into talking about atheism when I would have liked to have stuck with physics. At my talk in St. Louis in front of the American Astronomical Society, I was introduced by John Huchra, the incoming AAS president. He had stumbled across “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” and insisted that I tell everyone why. So I gave a version of the above argument, presumably in an equally clumsy fashion: whether or not you choose to be religious, it’s a bad idea to base your belief on natural theology (reasoning towards God from evidence in the physical universe), as science has a way of swooping in and explaining things that had previously been judged inexplicable by purely natural means.
And I think that’s very true, but I think something stronger as well: that claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting. But it’s an argument I just don’t want to force on an audience that came for some science. After all, there are plenty of claims that I think are true, but I don’t feel an urgent need to insist on every single one of them in every imaginable venue.
For example: with the acquisition of a reliable low-post presence in the form of Elton Brand, the Sixers will be challenging for the Eastern Conference title this year and for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly true, and an important fact about the universe that everyone should really appreciate, but not something I’ll be bringing up at my next physics seminar.
You are right, the best part of the article is the picture they have of you. Halos and all.
Maybe these are stupid questions, but here goes:
1) In this hypothetical multiverse, what direction does the arrow of time point? If it is the same as our universe, than don’t you have the same exact problem where the multiverse must have ‘began’ in an ‘unnatural’ lower entropy state?
2) What are the some of the implications for if the hypothetical multiverse had a different arrow of time than ours?
3) With your multiverse, aren’t you just adding another turtle and saying they go all the way down? If you are saying you see a mystery in the arrow of time in our universe, how does invoking a ‘multiverse’ solve this since it seems the exact same mystery could be seen in this new ‘multiverse’?
—
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
In the pre-existing spacetime, there was no arrow of time — it was locally in thermal equilibrium. Otherwise it wouldn’t really explain much, would it?
1) I agree completely. Most scientists I know, religious or not, prefer to keep religion and science separate. Perhaps a good answer could just be, “Religious beliefs really have nothing to do with this subject.”
2) The more outspoken you are as an atheist, the more people will know you as an atheist rather than as a cosmologist. You may be defining yourself by your religion rather than by your profession. Don’t be surprised if the questions keep coming.
3) Andre Miller and Elton Brand teamed up once before in LA, and it didn’t work out so well. But I’m with you – go Miller, go Brand, go Sixers!
Seems to me that once the question has been put to you, all bets are off. If someone asked you to explain how quantum vibrations can thoughts into reality, or how the positions of stars and planets determines one’s personality, you’d rightfully rip those ideas to shreds. Why should equally silly ideas be given special treatment if they come from religion?
It would seem that we have radically different definitions of “simple” =)
Are there any simple explanations of how our spacetime could be related to the pre-existing one, for either definition of simple? I can think of a few possible mechanisms, but I’m eminently unqualified here. The stuff that immediately comes to mind: we’re inside a black hole, or we’re inside tiny little rolled up dimensions, or maybe dimensionality is variable, and we’re in a spontaneously created set of dimensions… Do you have any fun theories?
I know this is asking for conjecture on conjecture, but it seems like an interesting/amusing line of inquiry.
Here’s where scientists get themselves into trouble with people of faith:
“And I think that’s very true, but I think something stronger as well: that claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting.”
I have a memory of being a kid in science class and learning what constitutes a “Scientific theory.” There were criteria that the theory had to meet. It had to be 1) based on observable facts 2) It had to be testable. 3) It had to be predictive. 4) It had to be repeatable.
Faith is certainly bad science, but that does not make it meaningless. There are plenty of things in the universe which are completely real and meaningful, but are not 1) based on observable facts 2) testable 3) predictive or 4) repeatable. That doesn’t make them any less true. It only puts them outside of the realm of things which can be probed or explained by science.
If scientists insist on science as the only (or supreme) tool to explore the world, then the result is going to be that a lot of people are going to use science badly. This is not because they are necessarily anti-science, but because science is the only tool that the culture allows them to use.
And this is why the world needs religion and art. Because it rounds out the tool kit. It gives people more than one way to explore and relate to their environment. The real challenge is to teach people how to use their tool kit– to teach them which tool is the right one for each job. If you try to solve the problem simply by limiting the tool kit, then you get a lot of people trying to hammer a nail with a measuring tape. It’s bad for the measuring tape. It ruins the nail. And it rips a big hole in the wall.
the only problem with your analogy with the free agent signing is that the NBA is still interesting and relevant while discussions of the relationship between religion and science are not. It is simply, as the old quote goes, like dancing about architecture or writing about music, an inherent conceptual mismatch defined by the fact that the venn diagram areas of each subject’s relevance are entirely non-overlapping.
I sympathize with your plight, sean, i would hate it if my job led to amateur philosophy hour questions like that:
“well thanks for your views on the new custom xml syntax for displaying interdependent datasets in a dynamic select list chain, now what do you think about Buddhist interpretations of quantum mechanics?”
I liked that Sixers team in the playoffs, they’re fun to watch, and this is a great pickup for them. My Blazers could be seeing you in the Finals in a few years. We’re entering a new Golden Age for the NBA, with more than a dozen interesting, likeable teams (plus the Lakers) legitimately contenting for championships over the next couple seasons.
I thought by the title this post was going to talk about something different:
In Tegmark’s “level 4 multiverse,” is there a universe/multiverse that has a god?
Although I think this is a fun question, it’s nothing for religious folks to get excited about. Although the question of measure is important, it seems reasonable that just as many universes would have a selfish, or angry, or careless, etc., god as would have a benevolent one. And this god would be just as ‘material’ as everything else in the multiverse — i.e. no reason to believe in afterlife of the soul or anything like that.
Mainly I think it is interesting to think about what would make a person seem, for practical purposes, “god-like.” For example, if it were logically consistent to somehow create physics with the effect of violating Newton’s 3rd law, I think that would put one on the way. My thinking is, if I can punch you but you can’t punch back, I’m getting closer to “god-like.” Problem is I also want to be “dark” but at the same time see you, which seems to violate N3 in the opposite direction. Of course I have no idea if one can make self-consistent physics effectively violating N3. Etc etc.
Sean, why was John Huchra so interested in knowing “why almost all cosmologists are atheists?” I would have thought that the should have been obvious to him and most of the audience.
Articles of faith in class (1) are certainly meaningless to science, but they are not meaningless to people. Faith-based religious beliefs are no more meaningless than the Sixers or sports in general.
I think the science/religion ‘conflict’ comes down to a simple matter of semantics and a missing word in English.
We have words for “rational” and “irrational”. Since we only have those two words, it follows that anything that’s not rational must be irrational, and vice versa.
But that’s not the case — there’s a third option. Arational. A-rational doesn’t mean it’s IR-rational, it just means that it’s something where rationality doesn’t apply.
E.g., why do you love your wife? It’s not irrational, but if it’s entirely rational then everyone your wife works with should also be in love with her instead of their own spouses, neh?
So, missing the third option we hit the nonsense that a religion must be -rational- (since it can’t be irrational), and it must explain everything (since there’s no third option).
On the other hand, if you spend your time meditating on the sound of one hand clapping then the third choice is obvious. You don’t get bent out of shape if you can’t explain how the universe came into existence. It did, get over it, let’s focus on the important stuff like what we’re supposed to do now that we’re here.
(BTW, one answer is that ‘one’ hand clapping is meaningless — you can only clap with two hands. Kinda like how you must always have two biological parents, even if one of them was a rat who disappeared the next morning — biologically a ‘single parent’ is nonsense in mammals. So the question itself is meaningless. Once you truly understand this, you to realize that there -is- a separation between the world and the words used to describe the world.)
In my small circle I am known for my interest in cosmology. When our discussions get to the subject of the existence of God I often had to struggle too. That struggle was the stimulus for the response I now invoke.
A Perspective on God
If I consider God from the perspective that the universe has always existed, that finite active crunch-bang arenas pepper the infinite landscape, that life in the multi-verse has always existed, and that physics is based on quantum energy of which all physical things are composed, my thinking is a follows:
Under those described circumstances there would have been no beginning so at all times past there would have been space, energy, physics, life and constant change. Physical change is occurring at all times in all places down to an infinitesimal level where quantum waves reign. At the quantum level constant change is characteristic of how energy is used and of the process of restoring useful energy from the remnants left when energy is consumed; entropy and the defeat of entropy playing out forever in an infinite history of arenas where the energy – to matter – to life – to matter – to energy process is continuous.
My view is that under those circumstances life would have always existed in hospitable places across the infinite universe and would be generative and evolving to conscious, intelligent, self aware individuals who can and do think and act based on their own volition.
Given those circumstances humans have the capacity to observe and effect change from a unique vantage point as highly organized and complex entities composed of trillions upon trillions of quantum energy increments united and made possible by the physics of the universe. Such a vantage point along with the intelligence and maturity of each individual brings with it the awareness of the concept of God.
Belief in God would be by faith on an individual basis.
Proof of God to one individual is not transferable, i.e. any individual who has faith in God based on what they consider adequate proof can influence others but they cannot prove that God exists to others.
The decision to believe or not believe in God is equally justified though it is natural for those who have made a decision to consider their decision more justified. Those who have faith consider themselves enlightened. Those who chose to believe that there is no God consider such enlightenment to be a delusion.
I myself am enlightened.
Sean, your answer on the religion question seems quite appropriate to me. It doesn’t pretend that you believe in God or that you see evidence of God in cosmology. But at the same time, it doesn’t go so far as to say “I don’t believe in God and neither should you.”
In general, I think telling people what their religious beliefs ought to be is just a rude thing to do. Having the general public see scientists as a bunch of preachy atheists is counterproductive to getting the public interested in science — because of the “preachy” part, not the “atheist” part.
But I do believe that you shouldn’t believe in God. And I’m very happy to tell you why I think that, if you ask. (Or if you read my blog.) But if you come to a talk or read a newspaper article expecting to learn something about cosmology, I’d just as soon not muddy the waters.
Telling people why they shouldn’t believe in God is no more or less intrinsically “preachy” than telling them why they shouldn’t believe in astrology or homeopathy or alien abductions or the plum-pudding model of the atom.
Well it is pretty obvious that the evolution and fate of the Universe is dictated by the Laws of Physics. And it is equally obvious that the origin of the Universe, i.e. the creator of the Big Bang matter arrangement, was implemented by God, properly defined as I just have done of course.
Sean –
I think your general point in your 5:01 comment is understood, but it is inaccurate. There is a big difference between ideas that are falsifiable and those that are not.
The plum pudding model was falsifiable. Some of the other things you mentioned are not (How do you disprove that an alien abduction ever occurred?).
If you have proof that God does not exist, please provide it. You won’t, because you can’t. It’s not your fault that His existence is not falsifiable…but then again, atheists like you shouldn’t pretend that it is.
It’s a bad bet, against whether science can explain things? … but explaining and justifying the laws themselves is a heck of a lot logically different from discovering laws and using them to explain phenomena. (If you don’t think so, then show me.) The problem is, without (?) an a priori logical/scientific way to get a handle on “what should exist, and what shouldn’t” – not at all to be confused with how to take some underlying givens or one set of assumptions “selected” ____ only knows why, and come up with results thereby – how can you explain one sort of thing existing and not another? How can you evaluate the inherent credibility or viability of a possible other with the self-reinforcing nature of what happens here?
That’s the whole challenge posed by multiverse enthusiasts, modal realists, Max Tegmark (basically MR), etc. That’s why some of them say, there are all these possible universes existing, and we are in one of the lucky, anthropically friendly ones. OK, maybe, but of course that pushes the envelope of falsifiability and those other fine values that were so great when the worked to the advantage of scientism, to criticize religious ideas etc. (It reminds me of how “conservatives” now find it so convenient to bypass the Constitution, go into debt, etc. in the name of the GWOT Maybe the perceived “need” of ultraskeptics to fight the GWOG is their equivalent of 9/11.)
Not only that, we have to wonder what sort of mess multiverses bring. I mean, “where does it end.”? Why even require the sort of “laws” everywhere that we find here, if every world that can be “described”/imagined is equally real – are there heavens and hells, cartoon worlds, why not something like God just existing as modal reification of Anselm’s ontological argument, whether now “needed” or not? But the worst problem, as I have described before: all descriptions include every way for things to act and move, not just “lawful” ones (which are a way of talking about what happens, not a “thing” that makes it so as Hume pointed out.) Hence we have a vanishing chance of finding ourselves in a universe which continues to be orderly, even if it has been that way so far. IOW, the chance you will continue to get head after head in coin tosses are just as tiny if you’ve already had a run as if you just started (don’t fall for gambler’s fallacy.) This basic point is dramatically strong in orders of magnitude and doesn’t depend on the details of the measure etc, pace what some prisses have charged. Not only that, even a fairly orderly possible world should have tiny variations of things like electron masses, things that just disappear and laws broken sometimes (since after all, that can be “described” as is therefore part of the Platonic mindscape.)
There thus needs to be a sort of “virtus” deciding what the universe will be like, and I don’t see it can be part of that same universe. However much like “God” or not, it’s at least a game point that the system of universes is not self-ordering. Sean and the like-minded: you have no basis for lumping game concepts like ultimate first cause in with specifically disprovable wrong models (like plum-pudding atom). You don’t even have a logical right to group it with non-explanatory unobserved entities like the overworked tooth fairy. “God” by definition means something responsible for this being here and being the way it is, and is not logically the same as any random, non-foundational proposal. OK, it’s not science, by definition. Fine, then it isn’t. It’s part of philosophy, but you can’t even talk about what science is etc, without philosophical reasoning anyway.
A halo!? Horns would be far more interesting and maybe even stylish.;-)
There are to my mind three kinds of God in the God-category. These are the deistic God, the Tao-God and the MUG-God. I present these in a nutshell and indicate what I think their relationship is to science.
The deistic God is what many people believe in, it was the God of the European enlightenment and held by many of the framers of the US Consitution. This is a God which by some force of will established a set of initial conditions on the universe which were then an input into some dynamics. Newton’s “clockwork” universe is of this variety. Depending upon the rational or theological tastes of people and believers this may include occassional divine interventions. Newton thought these were necessary to maintain the stability of the solar system.
The Tao-God is more mystical or metaphysical. This particular God is what gives the universe its “beingness,” or lets the “equations fly” as either Wheeler or Hawking put it. This is not a God which acts upon the world to change physical states, either now or in the origin of the universe in the big bang.
The MUG-God, MUG = Multi-User Game, is a God which created the universe as some programmer might script up code to run a virtual reality game on a computer. This God may, as the super user, intervene and occassionally come down as a player. This is something Christians believe, where Jesus is the super user who came down as a human avatar to do various things, purportedly on our behalf. This God is essentially the God of fundamentalist religion. Ultimately they can explain away science, and I am surprised more have not done this, by saying that this God created the world 6000 years ago with a state that indicates great age, a universe that originated in a big bang and the evolution of life. The term for this idea is omphalism.
Science, in particular cosmology, can most effectively test the claims for the existence of the deistic God. If the initial conditions of the universe, which might include the dynamics as well, emerged for no reason at all beyond something supernatural this should be testable. If observational cosmology should support theories which have these initial conditions emerging from a pure quantum vacuum, essentially a void, then the requirement for there being a deistic God is removed. Given that cosmologies are Petrov-Pirani type O solutions with no Killing isometries this is a classical gravity suggestion for how the universe can emerge from a quantum void. We need to get the quanta and the gravity to talk to each other right. If this is the case then a beliver in God is intellectually forced into supporting the other two types of God.
The Tao-God is not a God concept I have too much trouble with. My only observation is that it is what I might regard as excess metaphysical baggage. I think that science can’t address in any way the existence of this type of God. Conversely this God is completely ineffective at telling us anything about the observable world, but at least has the honesty to admit that. If the future of religion moves to embrace this concept and then use it to help people focus their minds, to behave a bit better towards each other and so forth, then fine.
The MUG-God is the most problematic. This is the God with thunderbolts, lightning and hell fire, and when you die will condemn you for having premarital sex umpteen numbers of time as an undergraduate, and this God as the Super-Bush cosmic FISA violator knows this. This is the God of the fundamentalist — Pat Robertson basically is a pangyric for this idea. Science can’t disprove the existence of this God, but this God is ineffective. A God which created the universe 6000 years ago (presumably on the Hubble frame I guess) could have just as well created the universe yesterday — with all our memories input as well as the supposedly man-made world. The attempts by the MUG-God believers to challenge science with ID and creationism are desparate attempts to show their belief is effective.
Religion is not going away any day soon. It will evolve, as clearly modern American fundamentalist Christianity is very different from early Christianity or that in middle ages.
Lawrence B. Crowell
But surely the honest scientist should be an [b]agnostic[/b] rather than an [b]atheist[/b].;
After all Sean, even you don’t know what “magic” might be occurring in the region below the Plank Scale ~10-49m.
When I was a kid I asked my friends how my finger moves through the air, does it do it in a continuous sweep or small discrete steps?
Even now that can’t properly be answered.
Be a little humble, I believe there are some pretty “magical” things left for us to discover.
Agnosticism requires maturity both in an individual and a civilisation.
Unfortunately, our early civilisations’ attempts at explaining the mysteries of existence still permeate our culture and growing up will take a long time .
Some good, solid, scientific discoveries would help , rather than mathematically obscure conjectures.
the sound of one hand clapping is a false koan:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ooj1noUU2NM
(and many others, as originated by Bart Simpson many years ago)
just like the egg obviously came before the chicken, it’s time to retire this phrase ;o)
don’t disagree with the observation that symbols and their referents are distinct from each other, or that language is inherently nebulous of course
interesting article on http://www.arxivblog.com/ about the symbol grounding problem, which might be of interest to those who care about the foundations of meaning, btw
“What do you say?”
I’ve always liked Laplace’s response to Napoleon when asked why there was no mention of God in his book on Celestial Mechanics. Laplace replied that he “had found no need for that assumption!”
Agnosticism v. Atheism? This depends upon the theo one is objecting to.
In my case above I am atheistic about the MUG-God. The idea is not only ineffective, but it is puerile and silly. The attempts by fundamentalists to show some scientific effectiveness with creationism or ID are facile charades, which in a political sense are as much designed to end science.
The deistic God I see as a cosmological analogue of a Maxwell demon. The point of cosmology is to exorcise the demon, just as Szilard removed Maxwell’s demon and tightened up the second law of thermodynamics. So I am nontheistic or atheistic-agnostic about this God. The purpose of this God as a concept is to eliminate the effectiveness of the concept. The goal of exorcing this demon is yet to be accomplished.
The Tao-God is a bit stranger. I see the question of whether this God exists as similar to the argument over whether mathematics exists in some Platonic sense. I am completely agnostic on that argument. I can see both sides of the argument, but there is nothing I see which compels me to firmly take one side over the other. Of course is mathematics really changed by taking one side over the other? Not really. The same holds for the Tao-God with respect to science.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Sean wrote:
And I don’t see anything wrong with telling someone that you think they shouldn’t believe in God if they ask.
But in cases where you haven’t been explicitly asked, I do think it’s more “preachy” than telling them they shouldn’t believe in, say, the plum-pudding model of the atom. If someone told you that they believed in the plum pudding model, but didn’t ask your opinion, would you really bite your tongue and not tell them it’s been shown to be false?
To me, God is different for two reasons. First, while there’s a rather overwhelming lack of evidence for the existence of God, there isn’t really evidence against God’s existence either. It’s not like the plum pudding model, where it’s actually been disproven by experiment. Now if someone were claiming something were evidence for God that really isn’t evidence, I absolutely would call them on it. But if they want to believe in God for philosophical reasons in spite of the lack of evidence, then I suppose they’re entitled to their personal philosophical preferences (as long as they aren’t starting a crusade over it).
Second, from a pragmatic perspective, there are a lot of people who aren’t going to give up their belief in God no matter what you say, and I think it makes more sense to try to convince them they can believe in scientific truth even if they insist on maintaining some conception of God — rather than driving them further from science by telling them it doesn’t afford any room for their spiritual beliefs.
I’m reluctant to talk about the existence of God, and I haven’t really perfected an answer when the subject comes up.
I encountered a phrase recently (in a much longer answer about the existent of God), and I’m beginning to think it’s the ideal answer when you’re asked about the existence of God in the wrong venue:
“Probably not.”
E.g., “Does God exist in a multiverse?” “Probably not.”
Someone who’s determined to believe in God is going to latch onto that “probably” and let it ride. The hardest of hardcore atheists will accept as nominally true, for very large values of “probably.” And someone on the cusp of disbelief will start thinking about relative likelihoods.