Robert Novak, conservative pundit/journalist and TV personality, is retiring after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Novak and I probably don’t agree on many things, and he isn’t called “The Prince of Darkness” for nothing (nor does he seem to especially mind). But brain tumors shouldn’t happen to anyone, so perhaps this is the place to share my Novak story.
Last September I gave a talk at a somewhat unusual venue: a conference at the University of Illinois on “Plato’s Timaeus Today.” Most of the speakers and attendees, as you might expect, were philosophers or classicists interested in this particular Platonic dialogue — which, apparently, used to be one of his most popular back in the Middle Ages, although it’s fallen a bit out of favor since then. But one of the central purposes of the Timaeus (full text here) was to explain Plato’s theory of the origin of the universe. (Briefly: the demiurge did it, not from scratch, but by imposing order on chaos.) (Also! This dialogue is the origin of the myth of Atlantis. It was not, as far as anyone can tell, a pre-existing story; Plato just made it up.) So the organizers thought it would be fun to invite a physicist or two, to talk about how we think about the universe these days. Sir Tony Leggett gave a keynote address, and I gave a talk during the regular sessions.
The point of my talk was: Plato was wrong. In particular, you don’t need an external agent to create the universe, nor to impose order on the chaos. These days we are reaching toward an understanding of the entire history of the universe in which there is nothing other than the laws of physics working themselves out — a self-contained, complete, purely materialist conception of the cosmos. Not to say that we have such a theory in its full glory, obviously, but we see no obstacles and are making interesting progress. See here and here for more physics background.
And there, during my talk, sitting in the audience, was none other than Robert Novak. This was a slight surprise, although not completely so; Novak was a UIUC alumnus, and was listed as a donor to the conference. But he hadn’t attended most of the other talks, as far as I could tell. In any event, he sat there quietly in his orange and navy blue rep tie, and I gave my talk. Which people seemed to like, although by dint of unfortunate scheduling it was at the very end of the conference and I had a plane to catch so had to run away.
And there, as I was waiting at the gate in the tiny local airport, up walks Robert Novak. He introduced himself, and mentioned that he had heard my talk, and had a question that he was reluctant to ask during the conference — he didn’t want to be a disruption among the assembled academics who were trying to have a scholarly conversation. And I think he meant that sincerely, for which I give him a lot of credit. And I give him even more credit for taking time on a weekend to zip down to Urbana (from Chicago, I presume) to listen to some talks on Plato. Overall, the world would be a better place if more people went to philosophy talks in their spare time.
Novak’s question was this: had I discussed the ideas I had talked about in my presentation with any Catholic theologians? The simple answer was “not very much”; I have talked to various theologians, many of them Catholic, about all sorts of things, but not usually specifically about the possibility of an eternally-existing law-abiding materialist universe. The connection is clear, of course; one traditional role of religion has been to help explain where the world came from, and one traditional justification for the necessity of God has been the need for a Creator. (Not the only one, in either case.) So if science can handle that task all by itself, it certainly has implications for a certain strand of natural theology.
Understanding that it was not an idle question (and that Novak is a Catholic), I added my standard admonition when asked about the theological implications of cosmology by people who don’t really want to be subjected to a full-blown argument for atheism: whether you want to believe in God or not, it’s a bad idea to base your belief in God on an urge to explain features of the natural world, including its creation and existence. Because eventually, science will get there and take care of that stuff, and then where are you?
And, once again to his credit, Novak seemed to appreciate my point, whether or not he actually agreed. He nodded in comprehension, thanked me again for the talk, and settled down to wait for his flight.
Thanks Jason Dick and JimV for your comments. Yes, there is a vast difference in world views being expressed here.
It is certainly true that randomness and long periods of time are fundamental to the universe. However, materialists seem to be quick to attribute unique outcomes (such as human cognitive abilities) to random chance and long time intervals. I believe there is something else going on. There are some prominent scientists, even biologists, who would agree. (Examples are Simon Conway Morris and Francis Collins)
Materialists would even argue (as JimV has) that human cognitive abilities are not unique, but are simply at the far end of a continuous spectrum. After looking at how humans dominate the planet, that contention would not seem to square with reality. In addition, humans have intellectual attributes that cannot be traced to evolutionary origins, such as religion, art, humor, cooking.
As is obvious from our exchange of posts, these ideas have been debated and will continue to be debated.
What I find to be exceptionally odd is the expectations that materialists have. When Sean Carroll wrote in his recent SciAm article, “we seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which EVERYTHING makes sense to us,” he was, in effect, putting a CONSTRAINT on nature; that it ought make sense to recently, contingently and randomly evolved human cosmologists.
In the end, I claim, Sean’s view of human exceptionalism is similar to mine. His expectation cannot be rationally based on a mind that is produced by materialistic biological evolution. There must be something else involved in order to get the desired outcome that he expects. The materialistic view of nature is not the whole story. Theism is not excluded.
Regards,
Otis
Otis,
The problem with your stance is that it is fundamentally impossible to rationally conclude that any deity exists as an attempt to explain any fact about the natural world due to Occam’s Razor. Simply put, because gods are posited as being that make choices, the only possible answer for the question, “Why did this god do it in this particular way?” can ever be, “Because it wanted to.” This means that you need a specific new property of the god (its desire) for each and every thing you try to explain by invoking it.
So, you haven’t actually explained anything. You’ve just shifted the explanation. Instead of, for example, providing an answer to the question, “Why is the universe understandable?” you’ve simply shifted it to, “Why did the creator god want the universe to be understandable?” The number of questions that need answering have not decreased. In fact, they’ve increased! By invoking a god, you’ve increased the number of things that need explaining because there are also properties that are unique to the god itself.
The only possible way you could get around this conclusion would be to demonstrate that your definition for your god is specific enough such that it is possible to make explicit predictions as to what this god will do and not do. These predictions furthermore need to be a form of compression: you have to use fewer properties of the god than things that are explained. If you can’t do this, if you can’t make definite predictions, and can’t make many predictions come from few postulates, then your god explains nothing, and is handily ruled out by Occam’s Razor as a result.
JimV wrote:
You’re not the first to discover this. I’ve seen it in a number theory book. I think it’s called “Fermat’s Little Theorem”.
Jason,
The specification you can make about God is that His laws are the laws of physics. You would discard concepts like benevolence and omnipotence, and replace them with mathematical consistency.
Jason,
You make a very good point. It is one thing to identify the deficiencies of materialism. It quite another to argue that a God (of some kind) created the universe. (However, I think that it can be very effectively argued that the supernatural was involved in origins. For example, using a variation of Richard Dawkin’s argument against a creator God, where did the eternal high entropy vacuum, dark energy and allied equations and laws come from if there was not a natural process that produced them?)
As far as the nature of the God who created the universe, I don’t have to explain who God is or what he wants to do, as if his character was speculative and unknown. God has revealed himself to us in the Bible and in the life of Jesus Christ. Now you might not believe what is written in the Bible. In fact, belief in the Bible is not important for this particular discussion. I (and many other theists) claim that what is revealed in the Bible about God is a quite adequate explanation for “why did this god do it in this particular way?”
That brings us to the fact that the Bible says that God created the universe (Big Bang or high entropy primordial vacuum or whatever is the current scientific fashion) and he also created humans “in his image” giving humans some of the emotional and rational attributes of himself, the creator. Whether you believe the Bible or not, I maintain that this is a much more robust (and only) explanation for cosmologists’ ability to comprehend the mathematical universe than the random, contingent biological evolution favored by materialistic atheists. As scientists are continually successful in deciphering evermore mysteries of the created universe, the “God hypothesis” gets more and more support and the “materialistic hypothesis” is less and less tenable.
(By the way, please do not lump me in with the usual caricature of “creationists” who believe the universe was created in six days and that Noah’s flood created the Grand Canyon. I can assure you that there are many deep thinking Christians who far beyond that.)
Thanks again, I have enjoyed this exchange.
Regards,
Otis
The Bible also says that Elijah flew to heaven on a chariot.
collin237: That’s Wilson’s Theorem. Compare Fermat’s Little Theorem.
Colin,
Okay, that’s fine. But that just begs the question as to why these laws. As a result, it still doesn’t explain anything.
Otis,
No, actually, attempting to identify deficiencies of materialism and attempting to use a god as an explanation are closely intertwined. Using a god is just one possible way of trying to get around materialism. But it’s a logically unsound thing to do: materialism is simply an inevitable consequence of existence. Why do I say this?
I say this because I define materialism as this: materialism is the refusal to resort to any explanations that require hypothetical entities that cannot be understood by their very definition. That is to say, even if we were to make a thought experiment to build the most elaborate, powerful instruments we could dream up in our wildest imaginations, these non-materialistic hypothetical entities would still elude understanding (caveat: by understanding here I don’t mean intuitive understanding, but simply the ability to describe how/why the thing in question works or is the way it is).
So, why is this nonsense? It’s nonsense simply because if something operates or is, there must be a way to describe how it operates, why it is. The absolute best argument you can offer against this is that there are some aspects of the natural world that we do not understand (that’s the argument you have put forward, in fact). But simply not knowing certain facts does in no way indicate that we should give up by referencing an illogical explanation that cannot itself ever be explained, even in principle.
As for the Bible, suffice it to say that that text is so absurdly wrong on so many levels that it just boggles my mind that anybody thinks it offers any level of reliability.
P.S. You may have a first cause objection to my claim that the only possible universe is a fully-materialistic one. This objection fails because one needs only have a fundamental law that explains itself to get around the problem of an uncaused fundamental cause.
Jason wrote
Actually, a religious realist (that is, someone who believes in “God, but not a book”) can be more attuned to this requirement than an atheist, because he admits to having a tendency to neglect it.
What, what? Neglecting realism equates to being more realistic!?
I hope this is not off-topic, or else I am breaking my promise, but I feel compelled to say that Jason Dick’s #83 is my favorite comment of the millenium (so far).
P.S. Wasn’t going to comment further until I saw #83, but as long as I am here … thanks to Colin and Electric Dragon for the news about Wilson’s Theorem. Colin’s initial comment was slightly remiss in recollection, as ED pointed out, but still sufficed to let me find Wilson’s Theorem in my google search. (I guess I will have to stop calling it “JimV’s Theorem”.) My proof is different and less direct than the one I found from the search, but contains a number of other terms which are also only divisible by primes – as I said, I was looking for something else and stumbled on it more or less by accident, which made me wonder how much mathematical progress is accidental and hence explicitly materialistic in origin.
(As self-judge, I rule my comment OT, and sentence myself to one week without further blog commenting.)
But Jason, the “laws” can’t be treated as explaining anything anyway as Hume pointed out. Saying It
Neil,
It’s an explanation if it provides compression. That is, if you can show that many quantities can be explained by a few, then you’ve provided an explanation for the value those many quantities take by highlighting relationships between them.
As for why there must always be an explanation, this is simply because if an unexplainable entity is ever proposed, then it cannot be an explanation for anything, because by its unexplainable nature it could potentially explain anything. This unrestricted quality prevents it from offering the compression required for an explanation.
But Jason, then you have an infinite regress because whatever is used to explain the universe, divine or not, needs an explanation according to you, which needs an explanation in turn, etc. But if you say the universe is at some level self-sufficient, I’ll just say it can’t be because of the “why this way to be and not some other” and say “something else” must be responsible. It’s a “not” operator like I said: “Not” the universe because it can’t bootstrap its own way to be IMHO and justify it’s selection among the platonic possibilities (again, I must bring up my overworked term “modal realism.”) If whatever “that” is, can’t be understood I would say it’s just our tough luck that it has those problems, it is just a necessary background to there being “something”.
BTW those heuristics like “compression” (is that a term that philosophers of science use now, or just your coinage?) that we have developed because of their practical helpfulness in everyday explaining (i.e., from foundational givens like laws into things like what stars act like) shouldn’t be expected to have the same applicability outside their region of known usefulness.
Nah, you can terminate at a self-explanatory explanation. This would be an explanation with zero information content, such as “all mathematical structures exist”.
I think you were very tactful. I lack that skill.
I would have started it that way, but after a short silence I’d have continued that if god existed, then god would do so physically. There would be a god walking down the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change (or changing it at will as not to make god late). We would see a god made of matter, flesh and blood maybe even, and interacting with humanity with no less certainty than we interact with gravity. Otherwise there can be no god. For if god intended to remain a non physical entity in the physical world of man, god could just as well have imagined us to exist and never created the physical world at all. Since the physical world exists without a physical god, god must never have existed.
Jason,
I think the official term is mood swing. The more guilty one feels about thinking spiritually for “dessert”, the more one resolves to think rationally for “the next meal’s main course”.