Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. (There are more world experts in theoretical physics than there are people who have guest-blogged for me, so the latter category is arguably a greater honor.) He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I’m not very religious myself. But I’m always willing to engage with people with whom I disagree, if the conversation is substantive and proceeds in good faith. I may disagree with Don, but I’m always interested in what he has to say.
Recently Don watched the debate I had with William Lane Craig on “God and Cosmology.” I think these remarks from a devoted Christian who understands the cosmology very well will be of interest to people on either side of the debate.
Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig:
I just ran across your debate at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and greatly enjoyed listening to it. Since my own views are often a combination of one or the others of yours (though they also often differ from both of yours), I thought I would give some comments.
I tend to be skeptical of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, since I do not believe there are any that start with assumptions universally accepted. My own attempt at what I call the Optimal Argument for God (one, two, three, four), certainly makes assumptions that only a small fraction of people, and perhaps even only a small fraction of theists, believe in, such as my assumption that the world is the best possible. You know that well, Sean, from my provocative seminar at Caltech in November on “Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology” that included this argument at the end.
I mainly think philosophical arguments might be useful for motivating someone to think about theism in a new way and perhaps raise the prior probability someone might assign to theism. I do think that if one assigns theism not too low a prior probability, the historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus can lead to a posterior probability for theism (and for Jesus being the Son of God) being quite high. But if one thinks a priori that theism is extremely improbable, then the historical evidence for the Resurrection would be discounted and not lead to a high posterior probability for theism.
I tend to favor a Bayesian approach in which one assigns prior probabilities based on simplicity and then weights these by the likelihoods (the probabilities that different theories assign to our observations) to get, when the product is normalized by dividing by the sum of the products for all theories, the posterior probabilities for the theories. Of course, this is an idealized approach, since we don’t yet have _any_ plausible complete theory for the universe to calculate the conditional probability, given the theory, of any realistic observation.
For me, when I consider evidence from cosmology and physics, I find it remarkable that it seems consistent with all we know that the ultimate theory might be extremely simple and yet lead to sentient experiences such as ours. A Bayesian analysis with Occam’s razor to assign simpler theories higher prior probabilities would favor simpler theories, but the observations we do make preclude the simplest possible theories (such as the theory that nothing concrete exists, or the theory that all logically possible sentient experiences occur with equal probability, which would presumably make ours have zero probability in this theory if there are indeed an infinite number of logically possible sentient experiences). So it seems mysterious why the best theory of the universe (which we don’t have yet) may be extremely simple but yet not maximally simple. I don’t see that naturalism would explain this, though it could well accept it as a brute fact.
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe. But I agree with your point, Sean, that theism is not very well defined, since for a complete theory of a world that includes God, one would need to specify the nature of God.
For example, I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance, as well as loving to create sentient beings, so something like this might explain both why the laws of physics, and the quantum state of the universe, and the rules for getting from those to the probabilities of observations, seem much simpler than they might have been, and why there are sentient experiences with a rather high degree of order. However, I admit there is a lot of logically possible variation on what God’s nature could be, so that it seems to me that at least we humans have to take that nature as a brute fact, analogous to the way naturalists would have to take the laws of physics and other aspects of the natural universe as brute facts. I don’t think either theism or naturalism solves this problem, so it seems to me rather a matter of faith which makes more progress toward solving it. That is, theism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of God (e.g., when would He prefer to maintain elegant laws of physics, and when would He prefer to cure someone from cancer in a truly miraculous way that changes the laws of physics), and naturalism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of the universe (e.g., what are the dynamical laws of physics, what are the boundary conditions, what are the rules for getting probabilities, etc.).
In view of these beliefs of mine, I am not convinced that most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are very persuasive. In particular, I am highly skeptical of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I shall quote here from one of your slides, Bill:
- If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
which brought the universe into existence. - The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the
universe into existence.
I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)
I agree with you, Sean, that we learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects (or occur at the same time, if Bill insists). But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. I agree that just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole.
However, since to me the totality of data, including the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is most simply explained by postulating that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, I do believe by faith that God is indeed the cause of the universe (and indeed the ultimate Cause and Determiner of everything concrete, that is, everything not logically necessary, other than Himself—and I do believe, like Richard Swinburne, that God is concrete and not logically necessary, the ultimate brute fact). I have a hunch that God created a universe with apparent unidirectional causation in order to give His creatures some dim picture of the true causation that He has in relation to the universe He has created. But I do not see any metaphysical necessity in this.
(I have a similar hunch that God created us with the illusion of libertarian free will as a picture of the true freedom that He has, though it might be that if God does only what is best and if there is a unique best, one could object that even God does not have libertarian free will, but in any case I would believe that it would be better for God to do what is best than to have any putative libertarian free will, for which I see little value. Yet another hunch I have is that it is actually sentient experiences rather than created individual `persons’ that are fundamental, but God created our experiences to include beliefs that we are individual persons to give us a dim image of Him as the one true Person, or Persons in the Trinitarian perspective. However, this would take us too far afield from my points here.)
On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning. I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity.
In this model, as in Sean’s, the coarse-grained entropy has a minimum at or near the time when the spatial volume is minimized (at the bounce), so that entropy increases in both directions away from the bounce. At times well away from the bounce, there is a strong arrow of time, so that in those regions if one defines the direction of time as the direction in which entropy increases, it is rather as if there are two expanding universes both coming out from the bounce. But it is erroneous to say that the bounce is a true beginning of time, since the structure of spacetime there (at least if there is an approximately classical spacetime there) has timelike curves going from a proper time of minus infinity through the bounce (say at proper time zero) and then to proper time of plus infinity. That is, there are worldlines that go through the bounce and have no beginning there, so it seems rather artificial to say the universe began at the bounce that is in the middle just because it happens to be when the entropy is minimized. I think Sean made this point very well in the debate.
In other words, in this model there is a time coordinate t on the spacetime (say the proper time t of a suitable collection of worldlines, such as timelike geodesics that are orthogonal to the extremal hypersurface of minimal spatial volume at the bounce, where one sets 
) that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity with no beginning (and no end). Well away from the bounce, there is a different thermodynamic time 
(increasing with increasing entropy) that for 
increases with 
but for 
decreases with (so there becomes more positive as becomes more negative). For example, if one said that is only defined for 
, say, one might have something like
the positive square root of one less than the square of . This thermodynamic time only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time , that is, 
, is no smaller than 1, and then increases with .
One might say that begins (at 
) at 
(for one universe that has growing as decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at 
(for another universe that has growing as increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real , with respect to that time arising from general relativity there is no beginning and no end of this universe.
Bill, I think you also objected to a model like this by saying that it violates the second law (presumably in the sense that the coarse-grained entropy does not increase monotonically with for all real ). But if we exist for 
(or for 
; there would be no change to the overall behavior if were replaced with 
, since the laws are CPT invariant), then we would be in a region where the second law is observed to hold, with coarse-grained entropy increasing with 
(or with 
if ). A viable bounce model would have it so that it would be very difficult or impossible for us directly to observe the bounce region where the second law does not apply, so our observations would be in accord with the second law even though it does not apply for the entire universe. I think I objected to both of your probability estimates for various things regarding fine tuning. Probabilities depend on the theory or model, so without a definite model, one cannot claim that the probability for some feature like fine tuning is small. It was correct to list me among the people believing in fine tuning in the sense that I do believe that there are parameters that naively are far different from what one might expect (such as the cosmological constant), but I agreed with the sentiment of the woman questioner that there are not really probabilities in the absence of a model. Bill, you referred to using some “non-standard” probabilities, as if there is just one standard. But there isn’t. As Sean noted, there are models giving high probabilities for Boltzmann brain observations (which I think count strongly against such models) and other models giving low probabilities for them (which on this regard fits our ordered observations statistically). We don’t yet know the best model for avoiding Boltzmann brain domination (and, Sean, you know that I am skeptical of your recent ingenious model), though just because I am skeptical of this particular model does not imply that I believe that the problem is insoluble or gives evidence against a multiverse; in any case it seems also to be a problem that needs to be dealt with even in just single-universe models.
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models.
In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous, and furthermore I don’t see that it has any relevance to the question of whether or not God exists, since the first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time.
Nevertheless, in view of all the evidence, including both the elegance of the laws of physics, the existence of orderly sentient experiences, and the historical evidence, I do believe that God exists and think the world is actually simpler if it contains God than it would have been without God. So I do not agree with you, Sean, that naturalism is simpler than theism, though I can appreciate how you might view it that way.
Best wishes,
Don
TY,
Let me push that a step further to salve my conscience– Are medical reasons the only acceptable cases wherein we would check our intuitions/perceptions? Can’t they be social or evolutionary (or whatever) too? I would think that even our own desires and motivations are sufficient to sometimes mislead us, right?
I like the last ‘undivided looking’ quote of Aron Wall from TY. Problems arise when we start to put too much reliance on any perceptive, investigative, analytic, expressive, emotive or other capacity granted to us. They are all part of the life, and associated consciousness, given to us. They are all pointers to God, but if pursued for themselves they are idolatrous and become deceptive.
The gospel ultimately requires a surrender of your entire life before God, after Jesus, who laid down his life. God is then free to resurrect it in the shape he wants, not in the physical sense for the moment. I don’t challenge the ‘theist’ statistics, but for many, Christianity is a nominal adherence. I remember, as an atheist/agnostic, being told to enter ‘Church of England’ for ‘religion’ on forms at school.
It takes more than intellect to decide for God. It takes more than intellect to follow God, though that is part of it. The will and desire come into it. Thomas Nagel is an atheist, but he identifies and owns his personal prejudice of motive. “…I hope there is no God!…..I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God-…..” -‘The Last Word’.
I laugh a little when people judge Paul’s motives. This man was besotted with a vision of something and somebody bigger than himself, and he was entirely happy with that. So am I, on a good day at least, and the good days with God are enough to keep me seeking and going on through the bad ones when I don’t feel close to him.
Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. -Jesus
(Mat 10:39)
“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” -Paul
(Philippians 3:8)
Here you have coherence between teacher and disciple. As I said before, it is the underlying coherence of the Bible, with itself and with humanity, that verifies the message to me. I am talking here primarily about the deep themes and motives of the human heart, and the love of God for me in it all. I would personally say that this coherence continues to astonish and delight me the deeper I look. Sufficiently so that I know relatively little about the historical modes of transmission of documents and have no great need to. The ‘signal to noise ratio’ is very high on what really matters.
To follow Jesus is to lose your life. There is a promise though; you will gain your true life. God can work on our perspectives and desires. I am reminded of a film I watched recently; ‘The Judge”. The Judge is honest and honourable. He is dying of cancer and his shady son asks him if he believes in God. He replies, “What choice do I have?” Fictional, but it seems to be like this with many people, and it seems God still accepts them in Christ, honourable or not. I also was in a low place when I became a Christian.
BTW TY, I negotiated a better payment deal than you with Aron Wall.
Josh
It’s an intriguing question and I had to do some thinking on, “Let me push that a step further to salve my conscience– Are medical reasons the only acceptable cases wherein we would check our intuitions/perceptions? Can’t they be social or evolutionary (or whatever) too? I would think that even our own desires and motivations are sufficient to sometimes mislead us, right?”
I agree ones desires or motivations influence feelings or perceptions and my account for such things as murderers convincing them they are absolutely innocent and testifying to that in a trial, before judge and jury. We have seen many high-profile cases in recent times. That said, the truth eventual comes out one way or another, and people’s initial incredulity gets confirmed or those who were initially credulous now say, “Guilty no hell.”
But I also agree with Simon Packer that “God can work on our perspectives and desires.” Actually God does that all the time to turn peoples lives around. In the hymn Amazing Grace, the black slave trafficker John Newton wrote:
“Amazing grace!
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
I don’t think Newton wrote these lines to justify the motive of salvation. He was a cold and calculating businessman. God came into his heart and softened it so that he wasn’t seeing money and trade but real human suffering.
I also wrestle with this as I was thinking of this reply: Can we be sure of the notion of objectivity in the testing of our senses when we know that the science of the day changes from century to century with experience and our interpretation of phenomenon. There seems to be a two-way relationship that is hard to disentangle.
I’ll end here because I see my wife is ready to go out (for us to do some errands) and I don’t want to get into the way of her intuitions and risk trouble.
I see there was a question from Ty to me: “So, back to QM and the laboratory observations, is QM limited and in what ways? Are the observations incorrect? Both?”
My answer is that I am aware of no verified, replicated laboratory observations which disagree with Quantum Mechanics as I understand it. Which observations are you referring to?
As to kashyap vasavada’s example of the brown eyes and blue eyes, there again I think QM answers that via probabilities, that is QM is in agreement with experiment (in a probabilistic way) both for Stern-Gerlach experiments on electron spin and for blue and brown eye testing on the macroscopic level. On a personal level, it was a huge surprise to find out that the universe works that way, for which I am immensely grateful to science; it expanded my mental model of the universe beyond anything I could have imagined.
QM is simply our best verified model of how the universe works, and I hope and expect science will learn more and refine it over time. The universe plus our own rationality (such as it is) and logic gave us QM. One might as well say that it is illogical and irrational for the Earth to revolve around the Sun since our unaided senses tell us that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
P.S. Reading further along in previous comments I see that Josh and others expanded on my point and kashyap vasavada responded to the effect that he did not mean QM was irrational, just that it might seem irrational compared to every-day experience (which was also my stated point). Fair enough, but I look to science to conclude what is rational and what is not – that is what science evolved to do, and as I have said often, it may not seem fair, but without insisting on rigorous standards of verification we will get nowhere (or into thousands of religions) in understanding the actual nature of the universe – which can be stranger than we can imagine.
Hi JimV, please look up: http://www.researchgate.net/post/Will_it_ever_be_possible_to_interpret_Quantum_Mechanics_in_a_non-contradictory_way. Contradiction is part of life (of which science belongs), but I can live with these mysteries without seeing science in conflict with religion as we few theists in this blog maintain.
A few typos I made as I was worrying about the wife’s intuition, so this is the corrected paragraph: “I agree ones desires or motivations influence feelings or perceptions and may account for such things as murderers convincing themselves they are absolutely innocent and testifying to that in a trial before judge and jury. We have seen many high-profile cases in recent times. That said, the truth eventual comes out, one way or another, and people’s initial incredulity gets confirmed or those who were initially credulous now say, “Guilty no hell.”
By the way, last night I asked my wife about intuition/ perception after chewing on Josh’s comment, just to get another perspective (Undivided Looking as we say). What went into my head to engage her! She believes it works all the time. If you want a most steadfast believer, I can find no other person than my wife. I didn’t want to push back because I knew I was going to lose in that debate.
Simon,
Two things I wanted to respond to:
1) When you said:
“Here you have coherence between teacher and disciple. As I said before, it is the underlying coherence of the Bible, with itself and with humanity, that verifies the message to me.”
I would challenge you to pick a stronger point of justification for your belief, even just for yourself personally. As I’ve mentioned before, consistency is not a measure of truth, only the possibility for such a thing to be true. One can craft multiple consistent hypothesis for any set of data, but of course not all hypothesis are true. You must then differentiate their likelihood of truth on things like predictions and evidence, parsimony, etc.
2) When you said:
“BTW TY, I negotiated a better payment deal than you with Aron Wall.”
I laughed pretty hard there. 🙂
TY,
I’m glad you agree with me generally on it, though maybe we can just let your wife be there hah. I’ve got to push you father though because you claimed:
“That said, the truth eventual comes out, one way or another, and people’s initial incredulity gets confirmed or those who were initially credulous now say, “Guilty no hell.”
Do you really believe that? You don’t think we can potentially fool ourselves but never actually overcome that instigating misperception/false-intuition?
Also:
“Can we be sure of the notion of objectivity in the testing of our senses when we know that the science of the day changes from century to century with experience and our interpretation of phenomenon. There seems to be a two-way relationship that is hard to disentangle.”
In a sense, no, we can’t, at least not to any absolute certainty. For instance, we don’t know that we’re not all actually brains in a vat being force-fed all of this stimuli. However, by repeated observations and evidence, we can get extremely extremely confident on some things. You mention that “the science of the day changes…”, and while that’s true in some sense, it’s a bit of a poor characterization as it makes it sound as if our science has flip flipped on matters willy nilly. If anything, the changes we’ve seen science cause us to need make in our perception of the world have been an overwhelmingly positive march forward in terms of knowledge/truth. Given all of this, sure we could all be fooled, but due to strong skepticism and value of empiricism, you need not fret too much on these matters generally.
Josh, on your comments.
“Do you really believe that? You don’t think we can potentially fool ourselves but never actually overcome that instigating misperception/false-intuition?”
Of course not. Even the best fools can’t continue to live in their fools’
paradise, and they can overcome false intuitions. Rather, I meant to say it’s a tough act to be a fake, and really, what I had in mind were the early Christians or evangelists who certainly had strong motivations to spread Christianity but their intuitions and perceptions were genuine and the message of Jesus resonated.
On the other point: “Can we be sure of the notion of objectivity in the testing of our senses when we know that the science of the day changes from century to century with experience and our interpretation of phenomenon. There seems to be a two-way relationship that is hard to disentangle.”
I certainly don’t mean to say that science flip-flops, but advances so that we see certain phenomenon in sometimes radically different ways. I had in mind the Quantum Theory (QT) supplanting Classical ( Newtonian) Mechanics, so that even Albert Einstein was highly skeptical of QT (and tried hard, wasted all that genius, to undermine it). From what I read, the indeterminacy of QT might be due to so-called missing variables. So I was making a reasonable argument that our interpretation of reality, our perceptions, is a (partly) a function of the current science.
What is not changing is God and, as Don Page said in an earlier post, even if we were to have a complete model of the universe, it would still not change our understanding of God.
TY,
I’m tempted to wonder if our numerous comments broke Sean’s blog earlier hah.
Anyways, I know I’m digging in here, but this point about how we have to be skeptical is important to me, so I’m a bit committed here to trying to chase away caveats to that unless they really hold water.
Particularly now, although I’m glad we’ve agreed so far, when you say:
“Rather, I meant to say it’s a tough act to be a fake, and really, what I had in mind were the early Christians or evangelists…”
that worries me.
For surely you don’t really believe this either? If it were so tough to be fooled, I would not still be an atheist, we wouldn’t see cultists and conspiracy theorists like we do, and the remaining 2/3 of the world would be Christian. I’m not arguing (here at least) that the early Christians were fooled, but just that surely you don’t think this is out of reach (though I leave open that you might follow the evidence to deduce that they were not fooled)?
Josh, Sean Carroll’s blog is being stressed under the weight of comments, now creeping up to 1,000, and outperforming the Dow Jones Index 4 months straight. My initial intuition (proved wrong) was that Sean closed down the blog to bar theists like Simon Packer.
Some observations on “For surely you don’t really believe this either? If it were so tough to be fooled, I would not still be an atheist, we wouldn’t see cultists and conspiracy theorists like we do, and the remaining 2/3 of the world would be Christian. I’m not arguing (here at least) that the early Christians were fooled, but just that surely you don’t think this is out of reach (though I leave open that you might follow the evidence to deduce that they were not fooled)?
1) As far as human beliefs or non-beliefs go, nothing is out of reach. There is an American saying “A sucker is born every minute”. I like the European version in European Magazine, January 1806: “It was the observation of one of the tribe of Levi, to whom some person had expressed his astonishment at his being able to sell his damaged and worthless commodities, ‘That there vash von fool born every minute””. This sounds offensively anti-Semitic, but I mention it because it’s a general comment as much about the seller as it is about the buyer in any transaction. I go back to honest Abe about how nearly impossible it is to fool all the people all the time.
2) On why 1/3 of the world is Christian, it is not that the 2/3 are gullible at all levels. Part of the answer is that God gave human beings free choice, although 1/3 is still a commanding plurality. I’m very respectful of other Faiths so I’m not making a boast about the Christian representation (I stay out of debates on which religion is “superior”). Now if we look at the 2/3, only a small fraction is atheistic. So by your argument, it’s quite easy to fool an overwhelming majority of humanity all through the ages that a supreme being exists (“If it were so tough to be fooled, I would not still be an atheist,”). To anticipate a question, what is it about humanity that we believe in God, as if it is hardwired, rather than the result of ignorance or childhood indoctrination (“For the Bible tells me so” type of argument). That’s the the claim by Richard Dawkins (in God Delusion), and others. What a great topic for a blog post.
3) I don’t think that you’re an atheist because you can’t be fooled, because even absolute belief in no God (“7” on the Dawkins Scale) is itself a bit like fooling yourself. At the risk of making Simon Packer more envious about my “promo” talents, and you tearing your lungs apart from uncontrolled laughter, I quote Aron Wall from Fundamental Reality V: Some Candidates, and a Math Test in http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/fundamental-reality-v-some-candidates-and-a-math-test/:
(Beginning of quotation): “Well, what should we conclude from the mathematical nature of physics? I can think of two obvious hypotheses. Either (1) the fundamental reality is something a bit like an mathematical equation (yet not a mere abstraction, but something which actually makes the world go around), or (2) the fundamental reality is something a bit like a mathematician, i.e. a mind capable of appreciating mathematical relations. (I don’t mean either of these descriptions to be taken too literally here, obviously the fundamental entity cannot be exactly like a set of symbols on the blackboard, or a human mind, but the choice of analogy makes the difference to what effects seem likely to follow.)
“If the former hypothesis is true, we would have Naturalism, a worldview which takes the universe as revealed by the Natural Sciences to be the ultimate reality, so that everything else must depend on that. If the latter is true, we would have a Supernatural or Theistic view of reality.
“I don’t mean to suggest that (1) and (2) are the only possible candidates for the fundamental entity, just the ones I find most plausible. Some naturalists might instead propose that the ultimate thing that explains everything else is A) the entire Universe “taken as a whole”, B) the first moment of time, C) the most elementary constituents of matter (whatever they are), or D) some vague principle or force, not structured like an equation, “out of which” the Laws of Physics emerge for some unknown reason. But I don’t think these are quite as plausible as compared to (1).” End of quotation.
I think Professor Wall would be happy to take questions, if you or anyone reading this, wants to follow up with him.
Re: “Hi JimV, please look up:(link)”
I looked it up. It seems to have a philosophical problem with the way QM relies on probabilities and discontinuities and calls these “miracles”. It does not dispute the fact the QM predicts the statistical outcomes of all experiments with extremely high accuracy, but doesn’t like the methods by which QM does so. It would like to have a different theory that does not rely on, for example, the discontinuity known as decoherence in the Copenhagen Interpretation. Our host, Dr. Carroll, would tell him that the Many Worlds Interpretation is one such theory, but perhaps the link author would have reservations about that as well. There is no pleasing some people, but the universe does not care, and is what it is.
I repeat: I know of no verified, repeatable experiment for which QM (under either the Copenhagen or MWI) does not accurately predict the statistical outcomes, so I in turn ask you please to either provide one or take back your “… false. … which is it?” comment. After all, in the latter case, you would not want to bear false witness to other readers who might think you had made a valid point based on expert knowledge, who then might in turn quote you as an authority. (As in, “I read on the Internet, on a science blog no less, that Quantum Mechanics is irrational and doesn’t work!”)
TY,
I take your comment as that we are in agreement then– it’s not that hard to fool ourselves, even on big important things, and so we have to be critical/skeptical of our perceptions and intuitions. I can relax on it now hah.
Your comment was very long though and touched on multiple things. I didn’t feel a particular urge to respond to any of them directly, but you can let me know if you want me to address something specific.
@Josh:
“(As in, “I read on the Internet, on a science blog no less, that Quantum Mechanics is irrational and doesn’t work!”)”
Although this statement was directed to TY, let me intercept it and reply for the sake of readers of future million comments!!!
Yes Quantum mechanics works extremely well (some 1 part in 10^12 or so) but it is irrational in terms of our every day life!
@JimV
Sorry. Instead of directing the above comment to you, I wrote @Josh!
JimV, the word false implies, by the definition of Logic, the presence of inconsistencies. Let’s agree on that, if you will. otherwise we’ll have vertigo chasing each other in circles. My characterization of “false” was both technical, and specific to a certain inconsistencies between the mathematics and the lab observations that the article I cited (the author is a particle physicist at a national university.) The other inconsistency, which I now add, is between post-Newtonian physics. For example, there are inconsistencies between Relativity and Quantum Theory in regard to natural phenomena we think we understand from everyday life, such as energy and gravity, and both theories are highly accurate in their predictions. See . Kashyap’s comment. He’s a physicist and far better able elaborate on them than I would. Or if you feel inclined, a Google search would also help.
All,
On this whole QM discussion, can’t we just agree that QM seems quite inconsistent with our intuitive experience but the ontology behind it is not yet certain?
Then can we agree on two things:
1) QM’s seeming disagreement with our intuitive experience doesn’t make it true or not. What makes it true or not is the evidence, which we have plenty of in that QM works.
2) What we don’t have plenty of is evidence on what we should make of the ontological interpretation behind QM, and therefore to jump to conclusions there could be considered irrational.
Fair & square?
Josh, we are in the same tent. My technical knowledge of QM is as thick as the skin of my teeth.
@Josh:
OK! I agree completely with statement (1). The entire requirement for a scientific model is that its consequences agree with the experiment. No scientist can deny this. Whether intuitively it seems bizarre or not is not of any great importance. In fact many pragmatic physicists insist that no interpretation of quantum mechanics is necessary. You write equations and “shut up and calculate”. If it agrees with experiment relax and go to bed!! According to them, the epistemological or ontological interpretation should be left to some dimwit philosophers! I can see their point. However, we are human beings. In every day dealings, we do not stop with equations. We look for meaning in every thing. So with (2) I can agree only partly. There have been debates for 90 years about interpretation of quantum mechanics without any resolution. This makes me think that there is something fundamentally peculiar about nature that we do not understand with our brains. That is why I brought up comparison with our ideas of divinity, especially because of frequent arguments from atheists that religion is “irrational and illogical ” compared to ” rational and logical science”! If the world was completely classical, I would not have been able to give this kind of counter argument. Have you ever heard of any debates on interpretation of Newton’s laws? Clearly the world is not completely classical. Our everyday life is classical! So the argument stands! Happily it agrees with philosophy and metaphysics behind my religion. As I understand from the arguments in this thread, Christianity also has some beliefs which look irrational at first , but may not be so after some deep thought.
kashyap,
I laughed pretty hard when I read:
“According to them, the epistemological or ontological interpretation should be left to some dimwit philosophers! I can see their point. However, we are human beings. In every day dealings, we do not stop with equations. We look for meaning in every thing.”
largely because I agree, at least in that this is a popular voice right now (regardless of whether it’s true for most physicists). And it’s a shame.
But when you say:
“So the argument stands!” “…because of frequent arguments from atheists that religion is “irrational and illogical ” compared to ” rational and logical science”!
Don’t you think this isn’t really a characterization of the status of physics/religion as a whole though, and that it is rather a characterization of individuals and their beliefs?
For instance, consider some individuals:
[A] A physicists who uses QM solely on a “shut up and calculate basis” (in other words, he/she is quite agnostic to what QM says about reality on a fundamental, ontological level)
[B] A theist who believes on faith, without substantial evidence, in their deity
Then wouldn’t A be reasonable in saying B’s beliefs are irrational in a way without being hypocritical (on those topics exclusively)?
We could contrast this with:
[C] A physicist who knows that the MWI interpretation must be true and bases argumentation on philosophical grounds rather then empirical ones.
[D] A theist who makes philosophical arguments for god.
Then, yes, if C called D irrational, it would have some hypocrisy certainly?
This is why I’m challenging you that your argument still stands because you seem to (I’m considering your past comments also) talk about the dialogue between physicists and theists generally as a “pot calling the kettle black” situation when this is really dependent on the individuals, and you also seem to generalize about physics being irrational when it runs along perfectly well being agnostic to much of the “irrational” parts (which it’s a bit difficult to say whether physicists in bulk make such ontological claims or not).
@Josh:
“Don’t you think this isn’t really a characterization of the status of physics/religion as a whole though, and that it is rather a characterization of individuals and their beliefs?”
My guess is that majority of people who read Sean’s blog are atheists. But I think quite a few eminent physicists are thiests. However, I do not know of any reliable surveys of scientists about their religious feelings. I understand ,though, that statement of the national academy of sciences is neutral about existence of divinity, saying that “purpose of science is to study natural phenomena and not supernatural phenomena!!”
For physicist A, I would not have any problem in voting for his tenure if his research and teaching record is ok. But I would not rely much on his opinion about religion (including metaphysics), reality etc. The problem arises again and again that you are requiring same kind of evidence using our sense organs from experiments in natural science and from religion. That just does not work. There are no Geiger counters or silicon chip detectors for experiential feeling of divinity! So physicist A will not be justified in criticizing such feeling as irrational because this is outside his field of expertize! He even does not know or does not care for the meaning of his calculations! He cannot explain the meaning of his calculations to his wife, if she is not a physicist!! How can he criticize someone else’s understanding of reality? For C and D I agree. Incidentally, that is why there is no agreement after 90 years of debate on interpretations of quantum mechanics. Again, all of this goes back to our understanding of what is rational and what is irrational. The dictionary meaning of these words comes solely from our experience in daily life. You will not see anything similar to the quantum world in your daily life from the time you get up to the time you sleep!
kashyap,
I don’t really know how to respond to your comment other than to say that I maintain that a humble physicist, who makes no claims beyond what he has strong evidence for, can posit that any position which is devoid of evidence is irrational. I suspect we probably agree, at least in large, but are likely talking past each other as you are focused so much on how contrary QM seems to current intuitions, whereas I was trying to discuss that you can’t just look at that consideration alone. Rather the topic is more nuanced by the following:
A) QM doesn’t actually have to break intuition that much, depending on which interpretation you favor (on which, the verdict is still very much out).
B) Even if it did, if we were able to do the experiments which would differentiate between the interpretations, and this evidence pointed strongly to an unfavorable one… then what would be more appropriate would be to update our definitions of “rational” according with our evolving experience.
C) There is a staunch difference between things that are called “irrational” in the sense that they are contrary to general intuition (but well-supported by evidence) compared to things that are called “irrational” because they are not supported by evidence. And we all know that feelings are a poor source of evidence.
D) There are also vast personal differences. Some physicists make bold claims without evidence. Some theists make bold claims without evidence. I don’t see why both parties aren’t justified in such critiques then. But I also don’t see why, if I’m not generalizing all the theists, you can’t resist conflating such for even our hypothetical physicists.
Your exclamation marks hide the nuance of the topic here. Yes, QM is frustrating in its current state. But given all the considerations above, it doesn’t make sense to generalize physics as irrational (at least not yet) nor deprive physicists of a worthy critique that others (anyone, I’m not even directing this at theists) are being irrational (when they, in fact, are by not establishing their view in evidence).
Again though, I think we’re just talking past each other and much of this frustration is that each of us just wants the other to focus on a different part of this argument.
I realized I should respond to this as well:
“The problem arises again and again that you are requiring same kind of evidence using our sense organs from experiments in natural science and from religion.”
The only evidence I, or anyone else, should require is evidence that is accessible to all and able to scrutinized. If you’d like to explain how some kind of extra-sensory evidence fits this bill, I’d be fine with it. I’m not biased to my physical sensory organs at all; I’m just biased against being fooled by others, or by my self.
I am not following too carefully right now, but have noticed discussion on rationality. I think rationality is subjective to us, because our ideas about what is rational are subjective.
Kashyap said, “This makes me think that there is something fundamentally peculiar about nature that we do not understand with our brains. ”
If God functions from a perceptive/logical/mathematical framework greater than ours, our rationality is ‘parochial’. It will also likely be personal, i.e. not uniform throughout humanity.
Maths is fascinating because these constraints don’t apply much.
QM is actually quite pragmatic in terms of when it is used. While say QCD, which incidentally requires non-analytic modelling, correctly seems to model the strong force, and therefore nuclear stability, very accurately, I don’t think anyone finally knows what is going on pictorially. There are excellent figurative representations, but that is probably all we can say. Because of this, QCD can only be applied in ‘micro-contexts’ where it is known to work.
I would say QM is limited in rationality. Personally I’m amazed by the deductions and associated abstractions in it, and particularly the accuracy when applied within remit. To call it ‘a triumph of rational thought’ would be true enough. To call it ‘rational’ in the sense of ‘fully understood with the rational mind’ would not.
In reality our science and engineering is a mix of absolute rationale and pragmatism. If we design say a nuclear reactor, we are likely to use classical physics for say, cooling capacity or pressure vessel structural integrity. We would likely use QM for neutron capture cross sections, nucleus stability etc. We would probably use empirically derived simplified numerical models for fuel poison accumulation etc.
In short, we use different methods, all with a degree of rationality, in different contexts. I therefore do not see a completely hard line between rational processes as used in engineering, my former sphere, and rational thought processes involved in religious faith.
Kashyap, please correct my physics as necessary.
Redefining irrational to mean “not what we would have expected due to lack of relevant experience” and false to mean “agrees very well with all the experimental data which it claims to predict, which was the specific claim, but I still don’t like it”are what we call “weasel words” in my part of the world (see Google if the term is unfamiliar). Other examples from this thread would be “I was unaware that Newton had ever stopped making calculations about the solar system”, and “the CMBR is also old data”.
To me this illustrates that theists and atheists alike are just human beings, exercising the competitive drives that evolution has given them, with no special neuronal changes or moral rectitude due to their faiths – just positive influences in some matters and negative influences in others.
That may seem harsh, and I am sorry for hurt feelings if it causes any, but since my opinions are already designated as false and irrational by esoteric definition it probably will not be painful. I hope not, anyway, other than the necessary pain of suddenly seeing things in a different light (if it occurs).