And now for something somewhat different. After I posted my article on “Does the Universe Need God?“, there were a few responses at the Intelligent Design blog Uncommon Descent, including a list of questions by Vincent Torley. Vincent then went the extra mile by inviting me to write a guest post for UD. Not my usual stomping grounds, but I ultimately agreed, precisely for that reason.
Here’s the post, which I’m cross-posting below. This might be controversial, as a lot of people on my side of things will say that there’s little point in engaging with people on the other side. And admittedly, this is a subject where feelings can be pretty entrenched. But you never know — not everyone has their mind made up on every issue, and it’s good to try to explain yourself to unsympathetic audiences on occasion. That’s all I tried to do here — to explain how I think about these things, not necessarily to pick a fight or even persuade any skeptics. I tried pretty hard to be as clear and unpretentious as I can be. (Success is for you to decide.) In a world of shouting and diatribe, I remain optimistic that real communication can occasionally occur! We’ll see how it goes.
——
I wanted to thank Vincent Torley and Denyse O’Leary for the opportunity to write a guest blog post, and apologize for how long it’s taken me to do so. I’ve written an article for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, entitled Does the Universe Need God?, in which I argued that the answer is “no.” Vincent posed a list of questions in response. After thinking about it, I decided that my answers would be more clear if I simply wrote a coherent argument, rather than addressing the questions individually.
My goal is to try to explain my own thinking to an audience that is not predisposed to agree. We can roughly break people up into two groups: naturalists such as myself, who think that the best explanation we have for the universe involves physical quantities obeying laws of Nature and nothing else; and those who believe that a better explanation can be found by invoking a powerful being/designer/creator/God. (For the sake of simplicity I’m going to use “God” to refer to this notion, but feel free to substitute the more accurate description of your choice.) Obviously there are many nuances that are being passed over by this simple distinction, but hopefully it will suffice for this moment.
The dispute between these two camps isn’t one where people often change their minds at the drop of an argument. Minds do change, in either direction — but typically after extended periods of reflection, not suddenly in response to a single killer blog post. So persuasion is not my goal here; only explanation. I’ve succeeded if an open-minded person who disagrees with me reads the post and still disagrees, but at least understands why I hold my positions. (After giving an earlier talk, one of the theologians in the audience told me that I had persuaded him — not that God didn’t exist, but that the argument from design wasn’t the way to get to Him. That sort of real-time response is more than one can generally hope for.)
What I want to do is to elaborate on some crucial aspects of how science is done that bear directly on the issues raised by my article and some of the responses to it that I’ve seen. In particular, I want to talk about simplicity, laws, openness, explanation, and clarity. This isn’t supposed to be a comprehensive treatise on the philosophy of science, nor is it especially rigorous, or anything really new — just some thoughts on issues relevant to this conversation.
I will be taking one thing for granted: that what we’re interested in doing here is science. There are many kinds of consideration that may lead people to theism or atheism that have nothing whatsoever to do with science; likewise, one may believe that there are ways of understanding the natural world that go beyond the methods of science. I have nothing to say about that right now; that’s a higher-level discussion. I’m just going to presume that we all agree that we’re trying to be the best scientists we can possibly be, and ask what that means.
With all that throat-clearing out of the way, here’s what I have to say about these five issues.
Simplicity.
Science tries to capture the world in the simplest possible description. We are fortunate that such an endeavor is sensible, in that the world we observe exhibits various regularities. If the contents and behavior of the world were completely different from point to point and moment to moment, science would be impossible. But the regularities of the world offer a tremendous simplification of description, making science possible. We don’t need to talk separately about the charge of this electron, and the charge of that electron; all electrons have the same charge.
Simplicity can be quantified by the concept of Kolmogorov complexity — roughly, the length of the shortest possible complete description of a system. It takes longer to specify some particular list of 1,000 random numbers than it does to specify “the integers from 1 to one million,” even though the latter contains more elements. The list of integers therefore has a lower Kolmogorov complexity, and we say that it’s simpler. Scientists are trying to come up with the simplest description of nature that accounts for all the data.
Note that a theory that invokes God (or any other extra-physical categories) is, all else being equal, less simple than a theory that does not. “God + the natural world” is less simple than “the natural world.” This doesn’t mean that the idea of God is automatically wrong; only that it starts out at a disadvantage as far as simplicity is concerned. A conscientious scientist could nevertheless be led to the conclusion that God plays a role in the best possible scientific description of the world. For example, it could (in some hypothetical world) turn out to be impossible to fit the data without invoking God. As Einstein put it: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” Alternatively, you could imagine deriving all of the physical laws from the simpler assumption that God exists. While these strategies are conceivable, in practice I don’t think they work, as should become clear.
Laws.
A “law of nature” is simply a regularity we observe in the universe. All electrons have the same charge; energy and momentum are conserved in particle interactions. A law doesn’t necessarily have to be absolute or deterministic; the Born rule of quantum mechanics states that the probability of obtaining a certain observational result is the square of the amplitude of the corresponding branch of the wave function. A law is simply a pattern we observe in nature.
As far as science is concerned, it makes no difference whether we refer to these regularities as “laws” or “patterns” or anything else. It also doesn’t matter whether we think of them as “fundamental and irreducible features of the cosmos.” They simply are; science looks for them, and finds them. Vincent asks “How can rules exist in the absence of a mind?” That is simply not a question that science is concerned with. Science wants to know how we can boil the behavior of nature down to the simplest possible rules. You might want more than that; but then you’re not doing science. He also asks why we should believe that the rules should continue to hold tomorrow, simply because they have held in the past. Again, that’s what science does. Imagining that the same basic laws will continue to hold provides a simpler fit to the data we have than imagining (for no good reason) that they will change. If you are personally unsatisfied with that attitude, that’s fine; but your dissatisfaction is not a scientific matter.
Openness.
This is probably the most important point I have to make, and follows directly on the issue of “laws” just addressed. There is a way of trying to understand the world that might roughly be called “scholastic,” which sits down and tries to reason about how the world should be. The great success of science over the last five hundred years has been made possible by throwing out that kind of thinking in favor of a different model. Namely: we think of every possible way the world could be, and then we go out and look at the world to see which is the simplest description that fits the data. Science insists that we be open to all possibilities, and let the data decide which is true.
Suppose that you are convinced that laws of nature could not exist without a guiding intelligence that formulated them and sustains them. That’s fine for you, but it’s a deeply unscientific attitude. The scientific attitude is: “We observe that there are regularities in nature. We might imagine that they are formulated and sustained by a guiding intelligence, or that they simply exist on their own. Let’s go collect data to determine which idea is a more parsimonious fit to reality.”
The primary sin a scientist can commit is to decide ahead of time that the universe must behave in certain ways. We can certainly have intuitions about what kind of behavior “makes sense” to us as scientists — theorists are guided by their intuition all the time. But the use of that intuition is to help us develop hypotheses, not to decide which hypothesis is correct. Only confrontation with data can do that.
Explanation.
Science has a complicated relationship with “Why?” questions. Sometimes it provides direct answers: Why do all electrons have the same charge? Because they are all excitations of a single underlying quantum field. But sometimes it does not: Why is there a quantum field with the properties of electrons? Well, that’s just the way it is. Which questions have sensible answers is dependent on context, and can even change as we learn new things about the universe. To Kepler, understanding why exactly five planets orbit the Sun was a question of paramount importance. These days we think of the number of planets (eight, according to the International Astronomical Union) as something of an accident.
The point, once again, is that we can’t decide ahead of time what kinds of explanations science is going to provide for us. Science looks for the simplest possible description of the world. It might be that we will eventually understand the inner workings of nature so well that we will be able to answer every conceivable “Why?” question — we will ultimately see that things simply could not have been any other way. But it is also perfectly possible that the best possible description of the world involves some number of brute facts that have no deeper explanation. This is an issue that will ultimately be decided by the conventional progress of science, not by a priori demands that the universe must explain itself to anyone’s individual satisfaction.
Clarity.
The final point I wanted to make involves the clarity of scientific hypotheses. Perhaps “unambiguity” would have been a more precise word, but it is so ugly I couldn’t bring myself to use it.
The point is that a respectable scientific theory should be formulated in terms that are so unambiguously clear that any two people, both of whom understand the theory and have the technical competence to elucidate its consequences, will always come to the same conclusion about what the theory says. This is why the best theories we have are very often cast in the form of mathematics; the rules for manipulating equations are absolutely free of ambiguity. You tell me the initial conditions of some classical mechanical system, as well as the Hamiltonian, and I will come up with the same predictions for its future evolution as absolutely anyone else wit the same information.
Earlier I mentioned that the God hypothesis could actually be simpler than a purely naturalistic theory, if one could use the idea of God to derive the observed laws of nature (or at least some other features of the universe). This isn’t idle speculation, of course; many people have taken this road. The fundamental problem, however, is that the idea of God is utterly unclear and ambiguous, as far as conventional scientific thinking is concerned.
One might object: God is simply the most perfect being conceivable, and what could be more unambiguous than that? (One possible response, not the only one.) That sounds like a clear statement, but it’s not in any sense a clear scientific theory. For that, there would have to be a set of unambiguous rules that let you go from “the most perfect being” to the laws of nature that we see around us. As I argued in my paper, this is very far from what we actually have. It is sometimes argued, for example, that God explains the small value of the vacuum energy (cosmological constant), because without that fine-tuning life would be impossible. But why does God choose this particular value? Actually it could be quite a bit larger and life would still be very possible. Why are there 100 billion galaxies in addition to the one we live in? Why are there three generations of elementary particles, when life is only constructed from the first one? Why was the entropy of the early universe enormously smaller than it needed to be to support life?
Obviously these are perfectly good questions for naturalistic theories as well as for God. The problem is that we can imagine coming up with naturalistic theories that do provide clear answers, while it’s very hard to see how God could ever do that. The problem is simple: God isn’t expressed in the form of equations. There is no clear and unambiguous map from God to a particular set of laws of physics, or a particular configuration of the universe. If there were, we would be using that map to make predictions. What does God have to say about supersymmetry, or the mass of the Higgs boson, or the amplitude of gravitational-wave perturbations of the cosmic microwave background? If we claim that God “explains” the known laws of physics, the same method of explanation should work for the unknown laws. It’s not going to happen.
It’s not clear to me that anyone who believes in God should actually want it to happen. There is a very strong tension between what scientists look for in a theory — clear and unambiguous connections between premises and predictions — and the way that religious believers typically conceive of God, as a conscious being that is irreducibly free to make choices. Does anyone really want to reduce God to a simple set of rules that can be manipulated by anyone to make clear predictions, like we can in theories of modern physics? If not, God will always remain as a theoretical option of last resort — something to be invoked only after we are absolutely convinced that no possible naturalist option can explain the universe we see.
————
Obviously these very simple points don’t come anywhere near addressing all the possible issues in this area. In particular, I haven’t made any real attempt to argue that a purely naturalistic explanation actually is a better fit to the observed universe than God or similar ideas. Instead I’ve just tried to explain the mindset of someone like me who does end up coming to that conclusion. In my paper I’ve tried to lay out why invoking God doesn’t seem to provide an especially promising explanation of the world around us. Others may disagree, but I hope this has made things more clear.
#46 jim cross. speaking of building bridges…….the pope is refered to as the pontiff, which means “bridge builder” or “bridge”. he represents the bridge of faith between God and man. i don’t have a particular point in mind……..
#48 DaveH
“We already know it is” – quite a bit of faith in that remark.
Image yourself in a Rorschach Test that you both observe but participate in. I know that might be difficult since you seem to “believe” you can actually look at the world.
“We already know it is” – quite a bit of faith in that remark.
We do know. Science has observable results. No faith required.
Image yourself in a Rorschach Test that you both observe but participate in. I know that might be difficult since you seem to “believe” you can actually look at the world.
Jim, see my post at #26 re solipsism.
And if the external world doesn’t exist, who are you arguing with?
From the piece (under “Clarity”) Sean offers an avenue of counter-response which seems to follow a popular rut: “One might object: God is simply the most perfect being conceivable, and what could be more unambiguous than that?” By its raising, the rest of that paragraph promises to address that point of view. Instead, Sean deviates into the typical (if entirely sensible) territory of tackling it from the aspect of AGREEMENT, that the concept of perfection automatically lands on a non-ambiguous (and quite frankly, frustratingly popular) conclusion.
However, from one point of view (at least) which does not so simply follow the deep traditional rut of ‘thinking’ (WHAT actual thinking?), the putative ‘perfection’ and closely-related ‘omniscience’ attributed to a creator being doesn’t so easily wipe out the ambiguity so automatically concluded whenever the issue is brought up. Instead, to my mind, it raises a number of rather interesting questions within the context of what we can in fact observe.
Fortunately, we CAN, in fact, consult the PRODUCT of the allegedly ‘perfect creator’. In the context of the natural world which we are obviously obliged to consult (indeed the ONLY thing we can EVER consult, if one is at all brave enough to discount claims of divinely-inspired insight and knowledge from some ‘supernatural’ source) whenever we wish to check or verify the validity of any imaginary hypothesis or conclusion or whim of any kind, we may have decent reason to reexamine our conventional (and popular) conclusions, especially on this particular issue. After all, we have no other recourse to settle the problem but to examine the putative products of the allegedly ‘perfect’ creator.
For the moment lets grant that a ‘perfect creator being’ exists.
Then:
1. What reasoning would support the existence of a perfect and therefore omniscient creator responsible for a created product (the world we observe) riddled with imperfections? Why should the product of a perfect and omniscient creator contain imperfections?
2. Given that such a creator may ‘set it up’ in such a way to ‘test’ its complex products (such as we, supposedly, to test our free will ostensibly so generously bestowed upon us), why should proponents of an existing perfect and omniscient creator-being insist that such tragic imperfections of circumstance we all innocently endure in life are the aim and result of some perfect plan orchestrated by that perfect and omniscient being who, by definition, already ought to know the outcome? In other words, why should a perfect and omniscient creator be moved to perform such an obnoxiously pointless ‘test’ in the first place?
3. Given that the fundamental laws of physics may in any sense be ‘perfect’, how should this circumstance be reconciled with the existence of obvious imperfections in the arena of complexity which those laws of physics give rise to and which are far more parsimoniously explained as an inevitable consequence of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and entropy in concert with evolved complexity?
4. Why isn’t the complex ‘fruit’ of that creation (living beings like us) not given – by ANY credible observational evidence over the course of thousands of years of surveillance and hopeful hypotheses to explain what’s going on, in recorded human civilization that has undoubtedly been well-primed by these natural human talents of imagination we continue to be endowed with, otherwise variously known as make-believe, fantasy, and actively outright deception – the slightest smidgeon of a break offered by supernatural intervention when circumstances turn sour? In other words, why isn’t the ENVIRONMENT not always as friendly as proponent believers require of a perfect, omniscient and benificent creator-being GIVEN that that environment frequently and quite mortally assaults them? Why should ANY created living entity (including humans) be imperiled by an environment which is not 100% in its favor? WHY should any living entity possess a physically crucial viewpoint at all which does NOT always harmoniously match the environment within which it is obliged to struggle to make a living?
5. Why should a perfect and omniscient being be amenable to solicitation in the form of ‘prayer’ to change ‘his’ mind, invariably to intervene in ‘his’ presumably ‘perfect’ creation – to change ‘his perfect plan’ – and thus grace us with occasional opportunity to entertain us with a DEPARTURE from ‘his’ original (presumably ‘PERFECT’) plan in the form of that hopeful and historically thoroughly unsubstantiated (again, unless one utterly discounts the human gift of imagination) spectacle of ‘miracle’? A ‘miracle’ is often given high importance; why do believers give hopeful prayer-induced responses (DEPARTURES from the natural order allegedly created by a perfect creator) more weight than the ‘Original Plan’?
6. Given the existence of ‘perfection’ and the ready admission of believers themselves that we humans are all anything BUT ‘perfect’ (indeed, often characterized as “wretched”), what justification is there for the assumption that any fallible human beings can, as a matter of verifiable fact, KNOW the will and intentions of a perfection of being WITHOUT flashing the handy dandy elitist divine revelation card? Just how does any fallible human being manage to become a reciever of perfect goods without being utterly deluded or WITHOUT CONSCIOUSLY LYING THROUGH THEIR TEETH? Why is this considerable and well-documented talent for misrepresentation in order to achieve a socio-political advantage in human beings for promulgating a potentially profitable falsehood – either through delusion or through active LYING – NOT a better explanation for why so many of us are trapped beyond the ability of any remedial education?
Like Sean, I admit to having fallen short of a comprehensive accounting in these posed questions. I do not feel satisified I’ve covered all of my basic concerns. But, like in his excellent treatise, I think what I have managed to blurt out here, however imperfect, will encourage some rethinking on the grievous automaton thinking (the automatic acceptance of what has been traditionally accepted based on a LACK of thinking) that entertaining a concept (like ‘perfection’) can in any way be construed to possess the property of any serviceable DEFINITION, let alone bringing with it any real knowing with the property of being ‘unambiguous’.
We, as fallible and chronicaly under-educated beings in the face of our natural environment, cannot possibly have in our possession, post hoc ergo propter hoc, the means to ‘understand’ that which is beyond the capacity of our observable environment to enlighten us EXCEPT as a loud and consistent refutation of the fantasy of perfection.
That such a large proportion of the population currently entertains the notion that they may tap into a supernatural entity APART from the product of a perfect creator is a ghastly commentary on the state of lunacy in the popular mind, in the shear lack of scientific literacy to be sure, but also in the day-to-day behavior which finds no connection to scientific, empirical or otherwise rational thinking based on verifiable evidence, and a far more gigantic problem than most scientists are willing to acknowledge with regard to this issue, which most of them blithely continue to regard as a mere matter of corrective education. We live in an era of big science, and the big solution is to establish ‘public outreach’ programs…a scheme which basically preaches to the converted, and scares away those youngsters who can smell a lousy advertisement campaign from a remote distance.
There are two points that seem to be coming up in the replies to the original post on the UD blog. First, that science can’t answer the question “why is there a universe at all?” This is obviously true. If there is an answer to this question, and I’m not sure there is, it is something outside of science, and probably outside of our comprehension. You can call it God if you want, but you would need separate justification to go further and say this God designs life, answers prayers, or is intelligent in any way.
Second, there is the issue of why we should expect the laws of the universe to be simple. This is actually related to two objections an ID advocate could raise: Is the argument against God from simplicity really valid, and is the regularity of nature evidence of an intelligent creator? For the first, I think there is a relatively simple response. If there are two proposed explanations of the behavior of the universe, one which invokes no god, and one which invokes a god who does nothing at all (modulo the issues in the first paragraph), it makes sense to prefer the former option. In fact, you would probably want to say that science *by definition* takes the simplest explanation fitting the data. There would be no way to settle whether there are things that have literally no effect at all, so there’s no point in discussing them.
The other objection is more interesting. It is extremely fortunate that the universe is so simple. It’s likely intelligent life could not have developed without this fact, since there would be little survival value in intelligence if the world was utterly unpredictable. Still, the world needed to be complicated enough that life could evolve at all, so there’s some kind of balance going on, and it’s not obvious that the window we find ourselves in (not too simple, not too complicated) needed to exist at all. These kinds of questions are also outside of science, but seem more meaningful than those of the previous paragraph. I’m not convinced this line of thought could be turned into an argument for or against an intelligent god, but I’d be interested to see someone try.
I just want to compliment Prof. Carroll on so effectively encapsulating the mindset of a scientist and how it differs from that of someone who jumps to the “God” explanation too early. These are indeed heavy considerations but they must be grappled with and I’m glad i was able to come across this discussion.
A small correction the last line of the second paragraph under the subsection “Clarity”: *with
@Brian #55,
science can’t answer the question “why is there a universe at all?” This is obviously true.
I don’t think it is true. There is this model, for example.
Even if you mean “why is there something rather than nothing”, then science can inform that. We observe that a vacuum is not empty. There are quantum fluctuations. As Frank Wilczek puts it, there is something rather than nothing because “nothing is unstable”.
Dave,
I did mean “why is there something rather than nothing?” And by “something,” I’m including a quantum vacuum that can fluctuate. So quantum mechanics might move the question one step back, but it doesn’t answer it, and I don’t think any scientific approach (or non-scientific approach, for that matter) can answer it.
Of course, God does not solve their problem, since the next question is “Why is there God rather than nothing?”.
Brian,
My take is that the question is borne from a misconception about the world. At the everyday macro-scale, we perceive “thin air” to be the simplest state of affairs. However, when we look at the world on the quantum scale, we see that there is no absolute nothing. The empirical world trumps our preconceptions, even our preconceptions about nothingness.
There must be nomological facts. That there is stuff is one of them.
It’s admirable to try to bridge gaps between two different camps; thanks for this often thankless effort. I think your very well written essay could be improved and made even more persuasive.
1. The examples chosen are unnecessarily sophisticated. With respect to laws, instead of talking about the Copenhagen interpretation or Hamiltonians or excitations of the electromagnetic field, why not use simple examples: All objects fall at the same rate. Once a mass is moving, it continues to move, unless acted on by a force. A cynic might think: Aha, this guy is talking about gee-whiz physics because he wants to awe us with his brilliance, not because his arguments are strong. The arguments *are* strong, but they would be, in my opinion, all the stronger the simpler and closer to everyday experience you can make them.
2. You haven’t made the single most compelling reason (to me) why a belief in God is unscientific: it’s non-falsifiable, in Karl Popper’s terminology. When a scientist makes a hypothesis, she or he is always aware (as Feynman put it) that the most beautiful theory may be killed with a really ugly experiment, at any time. There is no experiment yet devised (or in my opinion, capable of being devised) that could prove the non-existence of God. Maybe God exists, but that’s outside of science, period.
3. Some of your statements seem to me a little fuzzy. For example, you write “we think of every possible way the world could be, and then we go out and look at the world to see which is the simplest description that fits the data.” I don’t think that’s accurate. Phenomena are observed, and supremely inventive people try to come up with a correct understanding. They don’t imagine every possible way the world could be, because nearly all of those ways are scratched before they reach the starting gate. Maybe there are on the order of ten explanations for new phenomena, two or three quickly finding broad support (whether or not any one is correct); e.g. the discovery of pulsars and Gold’s rapid analysis. There might be fifty ways to make a pulsar, but forty-seven of them don’t merit ink.
4. Finally, you write “The primary sin a scientist can commit is to decide ahead of time that the universe must behave in certain ways,” and that seems to me unassailable. But people use working hypotheses all the time, and *expect* that an idea will be borne out by a new experiment or result. (In fact it’s just about impossible to do science at all without working hypotheses.) You’ve probably told your students, “Don’t fall in love with a hypothesis,” because the break-up can be very messy. It’s a thin line between expecting the universe to behave in certain ways and believing it does, one that is often crossed with disastrous results. Maybe this is too subtle for an essay.
Steven Jay Gould called religion and science “non-overlapping magisteria”; I guess I think of them as orthogonal.
@David Derbes
Why do you say that?
I think there have been many observations which have already shown the non-existence of God. Theists have responded by doing one of two things: redefining their god to be something so squishy that the term “god” is meaningless (eg: apophatic theology) so that it becomes unfalsifiable. This is in the great minority. The other approach has been to simply reject evidence, reject science and proclaim their faith even louder (eg: many of the folk on UD). Don’t make the mistake in thinking that merely because they still believe their god hasn’t already been falsified. Think of the Noachian Flood and the 6,000 year old earth – all clearly falsified, yet we still have a lot of people sticking with it.
The key here is that God as most people accept has specific behaviours and interacts with the world in a consistent manner (eg: is said to be loving, omniscient, omnipotent, etc). We can go further and look at specific bibles and the claims made within them.
When they retreat to a deistic or pantheistic god things change of course but since this is in the tiny minority, we can safely ignore them.
I never understood that. As a description it’s evidently wrong as religion is always trying to mess with science and 400 years of history have shown that science is ever altering and encroaching on religion. As a prescription it seems useless – no religionists care to limit their belief and it’s preposterous to set whole realms of investigation off limits to empirical investigation. Just how is NOMA supposed to work, anyway?
@Brian W
This isn’t obvious at all.
I agree that science can’t currently answer the question, but that isn’t obvious, it’s a conclusion we draw after careful examination of the state of knowledge. And it’s certainly not obvious that this must be the state of affairs forever into the future. There are many physicists and cosmologists working on models which would give us insights into the origins of the universe and while they may not bear fruit, it isn’t obvious at all that they won’t. It certainly isn’t obvious that they can’t.
Let’s not forget that quantum mechanics and the Big Bang are less than 100 years old. It’s incredibly presumptuous for anyone to be proclaiming the limits to our knowledge after such a short period of time. That these claims come from the UD crowd make it presumptuous and self-interested. Their whole schtick is to try to find things that we don’t understand and proclaim that to be the work of God. They aren’t good models of an unbiased observer. In fact, they’ve made this call a dozen times and with tiresome predictability they’ve been wrong each time.
We’d be a fool to join them on this bet when we’re still making new discoveries.
Brian W is surely right. At best science may unify the forces and express the laws in some finite form. Still, we don’t believe science will ever “explain the explanation” any more than religion will. Now we can say its a pseudo problem, and there is no explanation, but it’s still true that it leaves a fundamental part of reality outside the realm of logical deduction. This is the way it is, and we must accept that the universe owes us nothing more.
I wonder if we could be clashing because we’re using different definitions. Once you start talking about multiple universes, origins, etc then the term “universe” starts to get a little sloppy.
There is no reason to complicate the matter, when the fundemental
consistancy of matter at all relative sizes and masses, behave
similarly. Everything in the Universe, is in the process of regaining equilibrium, that said, obviously there exists an imbalance which is surely the original cause of the mode of order, the polar duality. All things are moving in a helical pattern vibrating resonantly, this is the manner in which the energy is dissipated, the path of least resistance. The summatiion of the total resonance, is the Universal standing wave, the ringing of the bell that vibrates for billions? of years. Very important to acknowledge that there is no conflict in the mode of the structure of the Universe that I previously described, there is a void because of the
absence of something, an unimaginable quantity of energy, in a state which is beyond our present understanding, must be the source from which matter as we know it,emanates.We know that all matter is in a dance of polar duality, and we ourselves live an existence of polar duality, I don’t believe this is coincidental. The really interesting thought experiments have to do with the cause of duality, the effects of duality, and the yet unknown final results of duality. There is no reason to relegate all this to philosophy, or religion, just as the universe vibrates, an energy sufficient enough to have generated it, must also vibrate, although at a rate, and in a mode, not yet detectable, which permeates the void providing the matrix of the framework which governs the machine-like precision of the elementary particles, the only thing left to do is to quantify what the density of the sperical container of the void must be, to satisy the equation for gravity. The most simply elegant construct of the universe, is a bubble, which contains the void, the most precise form of distribution of force. The energy of GOD contains the void and is using the void to regulate
expansion which would infinitely stretch the sphere of energy, acting
as a correction to the remainder of the equation. The necessity for humans,
and moral cause and effect, can be seen as analogous to the genetic code and gene epression on the scale of the organism. One makes the other possible, the correction of the imblance of forces, also codifies the correction of moral imbalance. So in condensed form, there is the WHAT the WHY, and the HOW.
If anyone is interested in my musings, I have a small book for sale
on Amazon called, “Because the days are Evil” which more eloquently
communicates my understanding of existence.
Humbly submitted to you by Michael York
“If a butterfly flaps its wings?”
@ Brian W. #58:
Sean addresses this point in his essay.
The question you’re asking is really something like “Why does existence exist?” and that simply doesn’t make sense, despite our ability to phrase it in language. Existence is the context in which everything exists; it’s not just another thing.
One issue with science as justification for god belief is that the decision to belief is not made by the collective of humanity, but by the individual.
The individual often doesn’t have personal knowledge of either the miracles and wonders that support god belief or the scientific experiments that support a scientific worldview. Accounts of both, indeed, are sometimes falsified. We live in a world where some individuals in every endeavor are liars, or pass on lies that they believe to be true uncritically from someone who did lie.
For the individual, who may have no special form of expertise of any kind, the question often presents itself as “do I trust one group of highly professionally educated people who say that they are experts or another group of highly professionally educated people who say that they are experts?” Do I believe mom, dad and my pastor, or some people I see on TV who say that they are scientists. Generally, it is beyond the reasonably available resources of the individual to even confirm that people really have the expertise and credentials that they say that they do.
When the issue comes down to who to trust as the popularizer of discoveries and conclusions admittedly made by others, the resolution of that issue for the individual trying to figure out what to believe is much less obvious than it is if one simple accepts mainstream science or mainstream theology as logical and rational.
Science is only concerned with what is observable. God is outside the system science is observing. Where’s the conflict?
As computer programmer I create a program to run on my machine. Let’s say that my program creates “life” at “random” times via a random number generator. Each “life” is its own thread that can monitor the status of the program that created it as well as the status of all the other threads currently running on the machine. Each thread identifies itself by its location, a representative drawing, on the computer’s wallpaper desktop. No two threads can occupy the same location. Lets say that each thread can make up to 4 decisions during a minute… a decision is made through a complex algorithm that selects from a library of actions, all of which I’ve pre-programmed such that actions have various effects on the other threads, based on proximity of location on the wallpaper.
Science in this system would be concerned with explaining why the processor of the machine that all “life” lives in only processed 4 lives at a time (or however many cores the processor of that machine has) in slices and also science would be concerned with the dynamics of why the Operating System runs the way it does and also trying to understand and predict the results of “actions” in the system.
Meanwhile I am watching my program run, entertained by the “life” on my screen.
Now take it to a mind blowing new level of complexity where the life is 3D; the creator of the program lives in extra-dimensions (just as I lived in a dimension outside the computer) and the creator interacts at rare times to encourage the frequency at which certain actions are chosen by the decision algorithm.
That’s an illustration of how I see this divide… there’s no conflict because God is outside the system that science is concerned with. Essentially God created science; Science can derive explanations for everything within the system because it IS the system… but nothing outside the system. Science itself suggests a beginning to the universe, but it really cannot suggest where the singularity of the Big Bang came from. God is my answer.
Where’s the conflict?
Tyro Says:
“@David Derbes
There is no experiment yet devised (or in my opinion, capable of being devised) that could prove the non-existence of God. Maybe God exists, but that’s outside of science, period.
Why do you say that?
I think there have been many observations which have already shown the non-existence of God.”
Hey, if you’ve got an experiment or an observation which shows the non-existence of God, terrific! Put an end to a lot of speculation and strife. It would be great!
Surely this has been published in a peer reviewed article? Would you mind citing the reference?
To #69 gr55:
If all that a religion asserts is that God created the universe, then there indeed isn’t much of a conflict. However, I don’t know what, if anything, follows from this belief. In my view it doesn’t even solve the creation problem, since then you have to explain how God and his world is created. In the example you gave, the little guys in the computer program will, after believing that you created them, have to confront the problem of how your world is created. So believing that the universe is created by a sentient God only makes the creation problem much bigger. (and if you assert that God can exist a priori, then why can’t I assert that the universe can exist a priori?)
A bigger problem is that most religions today assert much more than that. Most Christians believe that living things are specifically created by God, instead of emerging through evolution as a result of the environment on Earth (which is, by the way, the crowd Sean wrote the article to). Most believe that the human mind works in mysterious ways outside science, instead of by the interactions among molecules in the brain. Many still believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, and that God is still affecting today’s world through miracles. If you read through the above again, you’ll see that all issues raised there are directly within the purview of the natural sciences, and that science gives quite different answers to these questions.
In my view, the main difference between science and religion is not even on those issues. The main difference is the attitude toward how to answer the questions we have. Science purposes that we try to answer them using empirical data and logical deduction. Religion purposes that we answer them by directly claiming certain things to be true, perhaps those supported by intuition. Sure, that will answer more questions than science will, but how certain are you in those answers? For the source of the Big Bang, anyone can say “God is my answer”, but how certain are you of that answer? How are you going to convince anyone else that that answer is correct? If you are certain of that answer because it “feels right”, be aware that at one time it “feels right” that time is absolute, and that particles always have a well defined location and momentum. Those are two big ones. I don’t think it is necessary to list the many other ways “feelings” have already led us astray. (This is not to say we never use intuition in science. As Sean probably has already said, we use them to formulate hypotheses, not to reach conclusions).
I certainly agree that people should reach their own conclusions, especially considering that I believe there is no God to punish you for reaching the wrong ones. Looking at the current political climate in the US, I can just hope that the Christians can do more of this in return.
The obsession the human race has with the paradox of perfection,
cause and effect, and sacrifice must have arisen from somewhere
outside genetic predisposition alone. We are subject to a specific
set of stimuli which we call existence. Can we really separate
the observable phenomena of our universe from the human drama
we experience. Is the universe nothing more than collection of
expanding matter and energy governed by physical mechanics, and
our human experience nothing more than random interactions between
talking animals during a brief moment in the lifespan of the universe.
To believe that there is a higher order cause and effect plan which
dictates the mode of existence gives the universe, and mankind,
a reason to be while providing the answer to the paradox. Ultimately
GOD will not have to convince us that perfection is just a good thing,
it will be understood that it is the way it must be. The watchmaker
does not have to apologize for having made a perfectly precise timekeeping
device, you would not ask him to alter the mechanism to be not so perfect
in order for you to feel better about your imperfections. It is necessary
to negate the effect of imbalance, which is played out in the universal
material realm, and in the interdependant interplay of human interaction
within the confines of an imblanced system. I am compelled to believe that
everything is progressing to a resolution in a systematized process. Why must scientifically observed phenomena be an external construct which
arises out of nothingness for no purpose, and our personal need to embrace
purpose be referred to as mythological fairie tale. If GOD is executing
a plan to reveal himself to humanity, He would by necessity have to be
inherently unprovable by human calculation, else faith would have no
purpose. It’s all about the resolution to a seeming paradox that
dictates creation.
@randommuser
The natural followup question of how then was God created indeed makes the whole system more complex; but again… science is not concerned with that outside system. It’s concerned with our system, our universe. So what you’re doing is dismissing a possible answer to your original question by changing the question itself. The original question was how was OUR universe created?
I also have no problem with the concept that living things were created by God. In fact in my example, something would have to be initially created to get evolution going. If the programmer programmed every possible mutation that evolution eventually catalogs as must have occurred could you not say that the resulting creature was created by the programmer (albeit indirectly) through creation of the code? Now the account of this happening is being explained to primitive lifeforms… do you explain the C++ programming language or do you simply tell them you made it all?
In your final thought you bring in the idea of religion, striking a difference in how science vs. religion attempt to answer our questions:
First let me say that I separate the idea of God and the idea of religion. I think that religion is not really concerned with explanations of the physical world as its purpose (as you implied by comparing it to science). I think religion is fully concerned with morality. And further I’d say that science is completely unconcerned with morality. In short they answer different sets of questions.
That begs the question: why then does the Bible cover creation at all?
It must. It must, because it is conveying a moral code. The only reason the Bible spends any time talking about creation is that it’s a beginning and the basis for where the authority for the morality the rest of the religion conveys originates. The entire rest of the Bible is chiefly concerned with morality for societies.
A code of morals must be rooted in some authority… otherwise there is no reason for any one person to agree with them and follow them. Religion does this by assuming that God created our existence. For the non-religious, those individuals make themselves the authority for their moral code or make the government the authority for their moral code.
You asked:
For the source of the Big Bang, anyone can say “God is my answer”, but how certain are you of that answer?
I am certain, but it really doesn’t matter whether I am certain. It seems a more plausible answer to me that our universe, which had a beginning, also had a creator who started this program.
How are you going to convince anyone else that that answer is correct?
I cannot. Since I live inside our universe I cannot prove the existence of anything outside it… your question is like asking a fish in a pond in Hawaii to prove the existence of Niagara Falls.
A case of “it feels right”:
It’s not a feeling, it’s that the moment science proved the universe had a beginning with the Big Bang, and is expanding, there had to be a creator somewhere to start it off.
The first explanation from Sean above is regarding Simplicity… citing “God + the natural world” is less simple than “the natural world.”… the problem with this is: of course it is… but this is like saying “Solar System + Earth” is less simple than “Earth”. One does not then proceed to conclude that the solar system does not exist.
As the universe expands, what is it sitting in which gets displaced by expanding universe?
We can only observe the inside of our universe… so why does science dismiss the concept of a creator which sits outside the universe… in that same space that gets displaced as the universe expands?
Just as “turtles all the way down” was an insufficient explanation for gravity, infinite bubble or infinite universe containers does not suffice; there must be an origin, there must be a creator for existence.
Tyro @61
“I think there have been many observations which have already shown the non-existence of God.”
I think you may be wrong because there is evidence that perception occurs beyond the brain. Why could this lead to God? Well, how about saying that the universe is God-like, in that it “looks after you” at the end of life. The universe is structured this way.
One must seriously consider other ways of perception as a key tool for investigating this question of God, God-like etc. properties of the universe. See radiation oncologist Dr. Jeff. Long’s huge studies re this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mptGAc3XWPs
Another scientist Dr. Pim van Lommel talks about skeptics on this issue and the “acceptance by the medical community” – “The gap is not as big as you presume. It just looks that way because the skeptics are very active. The skeptics have their own truth and they don’t listen to somebody else who has a different opinion. So there’s a gap and there will always be a gap. There is no discussion possible with skeptics because they have the truth. But a lot of physicians are a little bit more open, but they won’t write articles. They won’t write or tell about it in public. I know some physicians who have had a near-death experience. They said to me and wrote to me that, what happened to me now I’ve always said this is impossible, and now it happened to me”.
I think these are fair comments but they do fascinate me because there seems to be a perception negating some of these findings among science in general. Yet this is crucial – medical personnel at the hard end of these observations see another interpretation.
Also the problem with these kinds of “observations” is that they are anecdotal but when they are also evidential you move beyond the anecdote. So valid data.
@David Derbes
Euthyphro’s dilemma is the obvious one which showed that the observations of suffering/evil are not consistent with the existence of a powerful, benevolent god (certainly not with an omnimax god). Christians today make this even worse by describing their god as “Love” which highlights the conflict between claims and observation even more.
Sean also commented on the Kolmogorov complexity of a god which was something Dawkins dealt with in TGD in more depth. You can see the responses on UD: simply reject the science and declare that God is described as simple and therefore is simple, QED.
And since you seem to be giddily anticipating some stats, Francis Galton analyzed the health of the British Royals since the nation prayed for their health and found no evidence of efficacy. There have been many subsequent studies, and still no demonstrable effect. Again this shows that, despite the claims and beliefs of many religion folk, God is not listening to prayers and responding to us as we’d expect (or rather, if God is, the effect is bounded and minimal). Again, the most common response has been to reject the evidence out of hand.
There are probably many more examples but I think the general thrust is clear – wherever God is said to interact with the world, we can study it scientifically. When we do, no effect is detected. This shows some conceptions of God do not exist. People can and do redefine their god so that it doesn’t interact with the world. Just because people will call physics “god”, it doesn’t mean it is and at some point the honest thing to do is to say that we have shown that gods (by any reasonable definition of the word) do not exist.