Monday, April 12, 2010

What’s Left for God to Do?
Shane Hayes

[In his long comment under my “Notice to First-Time Visitors” Wayne said, in part: “I am currently reading Finding Darwin’s God by Kenneth R. Miller. I highly recommend this book. He very astutely shows how evolution stands the test of time, but he also shows sensitivity to religion.”]

Wayne,

I like the thrust of the first passage you quote from Miller’s book, but I’m struck by how completely he contradicts it in the second quoted passage. It’s almost as if he changed his mind in the interval between writing them. He ends up in the same camp as the New Atheists he initially rebukes. Miller seems to say the New Atheists are wrong to proclaim, based on science, that there is no God, BUT “we are a practical species interested in getting results,” so they are right, after all. His second thought is weaker than his first, and there’s no logic in his reversal of position. Our being a practical species doesn’t mean God is a delusion.

In his latter passage he says, “Science works because it is based on causality.” I agree. Then he says, “We can exclude the spiritual as the immediate cause for any event in nature by showing how that event is determined in material terms.” I concede even that (accent on immediate cause), but with one exception. Science may explain every natural event, but it cannot answer the question, “Why does nature exist? Why is there a world – ‘something instead of nothing’?”

God’s Contribution to Science

The God I believe in created the universe to contain, in its structure and functioning, all the laws and forces that govern it. Those laws and forces produced nature’s greatest marvel, the human mind, capable of art, philosophy, and scientific inquiry. Divine intervention is not needed to explain why the seasons change, why volcanoes erupt, why earthquakes occur, why energy can change form while its quantity in a closed system remains constant (the First Law of Thermodynamics), or why time brings disorder to isolated systems (the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Those fall into the category of secondary causation, and science can explain them without reference to the transcendent.

A Trifle Scientists Overlook

Miller ends by asking rhetorically: “Could there be anything left for God to do?” I reply, “Yes. Create the universe!”  Here the question is primary causation. In a recent posting I said this:

“Even if every gap were filled, every scientific question answered, the philosophical conundrum would remain: Do these explanations merely tell us how the Cosmic Intellect did its work, or do they explain God away? Where did the infinitely dense “singularity” come from, the “point of zero volume” that exploded with a Big Bang at the birth of the universe? The singularity caused the Big Bang, but what caused the singularity?

“A magic particle, smaller than an atom, that contained the whole universe. Did it simply spring into being, charged with potentiality so stupendous that all space and time, all matter and energy – all of natural and human history – were compressed in this invisible unmeasurable inexplicable seed? Is there a work of science fiction that rivals the imaginative genius of that plot premise? Are we to believe it had no Author?

Two Explanations: Take Your Pick

“Can you seriously ascribe it to chemical randomness or blind chance? And if you can, is that the best theory? Is it more likely that some arcane chemical quirk caused the singularity and its infinite consequences, or that an immense intellect conceived these wonders and had the power to make them real in time and space? A chemical quirk, or a dazzling intellect? Which better explains? (At moments like this, I confess, my agnosticism is shaken. But it will recover.)”

Those three paragraphs are from my essay The Greatest Scientific Mind, posted on 3/5/2010. I suggest you scroll down and read it to see the argument in context.

Shane

23 comments:

  1. Shane, you write,

    "Miller ends by asking rhetorically: 'Could there be anything left for God to do?' I reply, 'Yes. Create the universe!' Here the question is primary causation. In a recent posting I said this:

    'Even if every gap were filled, every scientific question answered, the philosophical conundrum would remain: Do these explanations merely tell us how the Cosmic Intellect did its work, or do they explain God away? Where did the infinitely dense 'singularity' come from, the 'point of zero volume' that exploded with a Big Bang at the birth of the universe? The singularity caused the Big Bang, but what caused the singularity?"

    Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok have proposed a naturalistic theory of the origin of the universe that suggests a possible answer to your question. "They theorize that the cosmos was never compacted into a single point and did not spring forth in a violent instant. Instead, the universe as we know it is a small cross section of a much grander universe whose true magnitude is hidden in dimensions we cannot perceive. What we think of as the Big Bang, they contend, was the result of a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world less than the width of a proton away from ours—right next to us, and yet displaced in a way that renders it invisible. Moreover, they say the Big Bang is just the latest in a cycle of cosmic collisions stretching infinitely into the past and into the future. Each collision creates the universe anew. The 13.7-billion-year history of our cosmos is just a moment in this endless expanse of time." [DISCOVER, Feb. 2004].

    This is an outgrowth of "brane" theory, which in turn is an outgrowth of string theory. "Our universe exists on a three-dimensional membrane that lies right next to another membrane. Every trillion years or so, the two membranes collide, unleashing a firestorm of energy analogous to the Big Bang. As in the earlier [standard Big Bang] model, the universe cools, gives rise to galaxies, and eventually expands to near emptiness. In this version, however, another collision between membranes then restarts the whole cycle of creation. Thus, time and space are both infinite."

    The Steinhardt/Turok model has yet to be accepted by the cosmologists adhering to the standard model, because, like the standard model, it has a "singularity," albeit a singularity of a different sort: "The model works so well that one might expect cosmologists to embrace it wholeheartedly. Actually, the reception has been lukewarm. One reason is that at the moment of collision, the extra dimension separating the two branes goes from vanishingly small to literally zero. That creates what physicists call a singularity, a point at which the laws of physics break down. Although superstring theory might help explain what happens in a singularity, it hasn't done so yet."

    Under the Steinhardt/Turok model, the gods, as "creators," would once again seem to be left distinctly underemployed, as there is nothing for them to create. But perhaps you would wish to try to rescue "god theory" (if I can stoop to call it that) by positing that only divine intervention could resolve the Steinhardt/Turok singularity by reducing the extra dimension to a zero point at the time of the collision between the branes? Unfortunately, god theory is replete with its own "singularities," the most obvious and immediate of which (depending on your choice of cosmologies) is, HOW did the gods trigger the Big Bang, or HOW did the gods reduce the extra dimension to zero? The inability to resolve this singularity (the naked refusal, indeed, to try to resolve it) is something in which god theory positively revels: How truly great the gods must be, to have done something that we can't even begin to imagine how they could possibly do!

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  2. What's Left for God to do -- Part I
    Shane,
    I believe you are missing Miller’s point. On one hand he states “By definition, a god is a nonmaterial being who transcends nature, so why should science, which deals only with the material world, have anything to say about whether or not a god exists. Miller is actually criticizing the atheists for saying God does not exist because God is spiritual and not material. Therefore, since science deals with the material world, it cannot prove or disprove a God which is nonmaterial. In the 2nd part, Miller is not contradicting himself at all, because he is not disproving the existence of a God, but instead is showing that, in some causations where we contributed it to be a God or supernatural, there was later found a material explanation. Miller has not turned around and stated that a God does not exist, only that as we find scientific answers (the material) to things we previously did not understand, the previous supernatural explanation melts away. Miller also stated the following: “Can the advances of science, which have so thoroughly displaced the pagan superstitions of animism, now rule out even a Western, monotheistic God? Had classical physics reigned triumphant, they might well have. Unexpectedly, the ultimate physics of nature did not complete a chain of cause and effect. It left an open window on events, a break in causality that is significant not because science cannot master a few tiny details of the physical universe—but because it cannot even address the question of why nature should be constructed along such elusive lines. In the final analysis, absolute materialism does not triumph because it cannot fully explain the nature of reality.

    It would be foolish to pretend that any of this rigorously proves the existence of God. If it did, we should expect missionaries to win souls by explaining two-slit diffraction and by showing the derivation of Plank’s constant. But the tools of science itself have discovered that scientific materialism has a curious, inherent limitation. And we are certainly left to wonder what to make of that. I could be just a puzzling, curious fact about the nature of the universe. Or it could be the clue that allows us to bind everything, including evolution, into a worldview in which science and religion are partners, not rivals, in extending human understanding a step beyond the bounds of materialism.”

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  3. What's Left for God to Do -- Part II
    Shane,
    Miller goes on to say the following: “Ironically, when I have publicly advanced the idea that God is compatible with evolution, I find that my agnostic and atheistic colleagues are generally comfortable with such ideas, but many believers are dumbfounded. “How can you reconcile divine will with a random, chance process like evolution?” is a common question.”

    Miller goes further and says “When I tell my students I believe in God, they suppose that I couldn’t possibly mean anything traditional, but rather something smart, modern, and sophisticated. Something subtle. Maybe I mean that God is love or God is the universe itself, or, being a scientist, maybe I mean that God is the laws of nature. Well, I don’t. Such views dilute religion to the point of meaninglessness. As Carl Sagan noted, such a God would be “emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” Nor, I might add, does it make any sense to pray to the second law of thermodynamics, which has never given me a break and never will. Such “Gods” aren’t God at all--_they are just clever and disingenuous restatements of empirical science contrived to wrap an appearance of religion around them, and they have neither religious nor scientific significance. In this book, I am interested in a traditional view of God—the one described by the great Western monotheistic religions. That’s the God that believers wonder about, that’s the one they pray to, and that’s the one who seems to be threatened by evolution. And that is the God whose actions, intentions, and existence I wish to consider in this chapter.””
    So, you see, Miller does not necessarily disagree with your beliefs. Incidentally, I have not read the chapter on God, so I will have to report back later when I have.

    You stated the following: “Miller ends by asking rhetorically: “Could there be anything left for God to do?” I reply, “Yes. Create the universe!”
    I believe you have gotten it backwards. Miller was stating that after God created everything, could there be anything left for him to do? We have evidence of evolution which made changes over time by natural selection. So, really, what was left for God to do, but retire. That is Miller’s whole point.

    To answer your last question, I cannot explain how things came about. I suspect a creator, but I have no proof, only reasoning that things are too complex to have come about by chance.

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  4. Additional response from Kenneth E. Miller on the existence of a God

    Shane and P.Coyle,

    Kenneth E. Miller has some additional very good arguments for the existence of a God. First of all “ the value of the gravitational constant is just right for the existence of life. A little bigger, and the universe would have collapsed before we could evolve; a little smaller, and the planet upon which we stand would never have formed.

    Our luck didn’t stop there. Gravity is one of 4 fundamental forces in the universe. If the strong nuclear force were just a little weaker, no elements other than hydrogen would have been formed following the big bang. If it were just a little stronger, all of the hydrogen in the universe would be gone by now, converted into helium and heavier elements. Without hydrogen, no sun, no stars, no water.

    If another fundamental force, electromagnetism, were just a little stronger, electrons would be so tightly bound to atoms that the formation of chemical compounds would be impossible. A little weaker, and atoms would disintegrate at room temperature. If the resonance level of electrons in the carbon atom were just four percent lower, carbon atoms themselves would never have formed in the interiors of stars. No carbon, no life as we understand it.” Kenneth does back pedal a bit when he says “We have to keep our minds open to the possibility that future advances in physics may one day explain the apparent coincidences that seem to link may of these constants.” Kenneth goes on to say that even no less an authority than Stephen Hawking has said: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”

    Kenneth goes on to say that Dennett, a vocal component of religion suggests that there could be infinite parallel universes with different laws and constants. In Dennett’s view, these multiple universes have undergone a kind of Darwinian natural selection—only a few of them had physical constants that were ultimately capable of supporting life, and those are the only ones in which living observers could have evolved. Dennett figures that he can apply the same approach to account for the pleasant convergence of physical constants that makes life possible. Evolution works on a multitude of genetic variations in a population of organisms, so he reasons that there could be a multitude of universes, each with varying physical constants. The problem, of course, is that we know that organisms reproduce. But universes? Dennett knows that we will never be able to find, even in principle, evidence for any of those parallel universes. If they existed, we could neither communicate with them nor observe them. Nonetheless, he is willing to postulate their existence because it relieves us of the need to find another reason for the elegant “anthropic coincidence” of our universe.

    P.Coyle, as mentioned above, we can show no evidence of parallel universes, let alone that one of them came into our space and caused a collision. If anything, the evidence provided by the motion of planets, stars, etc, shows them speeding away from one another in all directions which indicates the cause to be a Big Bang. I would imagine that a collision between two universes would provide an entirely different motion. Also, doesn’t it seem a bit strange that this parallel universe came into our space and then left afterwards instead of sticking around? I find that the Big Bang makes more sense.

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  5. Wayne writes:

    "Kenneth E. Miller has some additional very good arguments for the existence of a God."

    No, he doesn't. What he has are arguments that would suggest that the universe was designed. Even supposing that they were good arguments, there's a yawning logical chasm between "the universe was designed" and "the designer of the universe was a single sentient being goping by the name of 'God,' whom we know very well is not only still around, but is a Christian (or, indeed, in Shane's case, a Catholic)."

    Wayne continues:

    "P.Coyle, as mentioned above, we can show no evidence of parallel universes, let alone that one of them came into our space and caused a collision."

    I am not sure that I would agree with Miller's statement that "we will never be able to find, even in principle, evidence for any of those parallel universes." Physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina has argued that, not only will we find such evidence, but we have already found it.

    In any case, can you, in presenting that argument that the universe was designed, point to any evidence that it was? What Miller has offered and you have presented here is not evidence that the universe was designed, but a criticism of the argument that it wasn't. Distilled to its essence, the form of this argument is what Dawkins calls the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": "I can't believe that our universe could exist if it weren't designed. Ergo, it must have ben designed." It is possible to oppose to this an equal and opposite argument from personal incredulity: "I can't believe that our universe could have been designed -- and created -- by some big dude in the sky (only we know he wasn't a dude and that he didn't live in the sky)." What he actually was and where he actually lived and how he managed to live there and how and why he designed and created the universe are anomalies in the Big-Dude-in-the-Sky paradigm that mitigate against the paradigm and suggest the desirability of a paradigm shift.

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  6. Wayne writes:

    "If anything, the evidence provided by the motion of planets, stars, etc, shows them speeding away from one another in all directions which indicates the cause to be a Big Bang. I would imagine that a collision between two universes would provide an entirely different motion. Also, doesn’t it seem a bit strange that this parallel universe came into our space and then left afterwards instead of sticking around? I find that the Big Bang makes more sense."

    I would say in response that Steinhardt and Turok, the authors of the cyclic universe hypothesis that I outlined previously, are no mere cranks. Steinhardt is Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton (which, of course, is where Albert Einstein actually worked). Turok was formerly with Cambridge University and is now director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario (Stephen Hawking holds a visiting position at that institute). Those guys are heavy hitters. Nor do they postulate that our universe originated in a collision with a parallel universe. How could it have? It could not have collided with another universe unless it already existed. Rather, what they propose is that our universe originated in a collision between "two parallel orbifold planes or M-branes" which "collide periodically in a higher dimensional space."

    Now, you may find that the Big Bang makes more sense to you than this apparent gobbledygook, but that surely cannot be because the Big Bang is "common sense." The entire universe was once no bigger than a proton? Oh come on! Perhaps it only "makes sense" to you because it has been the dominant paradigm in cosmology for some 40 years. I doesn't make sense to the millions of Christians who devoutly and firmly believe that the universe was created in six days a few thousand years ago by the Big Dude in the Sky. Nor does it mean that the dominant paradigm could not be swept away and replaced by a new paradigm that seems to work better. We shall have to wait and see.

    Note well here the difference between the methods of science and religion. The Big Bang theory presents us with an anomaly -- how to account for the Big Bang. The scientists work to come up with a naturalistic resolution to the anomaly -- because that's what scientists do. The theologians jump in head first to argue that their "God of the gaps" is the correct explanation, when in fact it's not even an explanation -- because that's what theologians do. It's an appeal to the idea of magic. Hint: any time you have to appeal to magic to explain something, your attempt to explain has failed.

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  7. P.Coyle,

    You stated that my indication that Kenneth E. Miller had good arguments for the existence of a God was false by stating that his arguments suggest that the universe was designed. I will accept that, but I feel we are simply arguing semantics since when I refer to a God, I am referring to a designer. Also, God could be plural. BTW, I am a former Christian and now an agnostic with leanings towards a creator. I believe that religions are all man-made. Incidentally, the argument Miller is presenting is not one he invented. It is known as Anthropic Principle which essentially states that the Universe shows signs that it was designed to support man and life as we know it. It makes a lot of sense that we have 4 fundamental forces that all have to be within a certain close parameter, or life as we know it couldn’t exist. The odds of this occurring for all these fundamentals is astronomical without a designer. Dennett tries to counter this by stating that black holes are giving birth to multiple universes and tries to equate this to organic evolution. It simply doesn’t work. Universes are simply not organic so natural selection doesn’t work here. You state that the scientists presenting the hypothesis of multiple universes are high powered, but it still does not nullify the fact that they are only presenting an educated guess, not a scientific theory like evolution. Stephen Hawking is even more high powered and he believes in the big bang theory. Note that it is a theory, not a hypothesis. As astronomers B.J. Carr and M. J. Rees put it in a 1979 review in the scientific journal Nature: “The possibility of life as we know it evolving in the Universe depends on the values of a few basic physical constants—and is in some respects remarkably sensitive to their numerical values.” They go on to say “Even if all apparently anthropic coincidences could be explained by future advances in physics, it would be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened to be those propitious to life.”

    Can I show evidence of a creator? No, but I think the anthropic principle does make a very good argument for the necessity of one. I can also add one argument of my own. Though it has been shown that individual organs like the one controlling the flagellum on a bacteria was developed gradually through natural selection, there appears that in order for higher beings like ourselves to exist, we need all of the following systems at once and a gradual development of one or two at a time just won’t work. We need digestion, elimination, respiration, circulation, even a flap to keep food from going into our lungs, ability to stop bleeding and reproduction all at once. We cannot live with the lack of any of these. And if we somehow developed all but reproduction, the living creature would soon die and that would be the end. And a man would have to have a way to pass along its sperm, and the woman a way to receive it. Can you imagine the odds of that occurring simultaneously? I can’t.

    I find it amusing that you refer to the “big dude in the sky”. I submit to you that if a creator of the entire universe exists, he is far beyond anything we could imagine and certainly would not fit the image of the God described in the Old Testament or some big dude in the sky. 

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  8. Wayne writes:

    "I will accept that, but I feel we are simply arguing semantics since when I refer to a God, I am referring to a designer. Also, God could be plural."

    OK, but it would cause less confusion if you wouldn't use the value-laden term "God." Why not just go with "designers"? Perhaps you would also not object to my pointing out that the "designers" would not necessarily be the "builders." The analogy here is to the human world, where those who design things are not necessarily the same people as those who build them.

    Wayne continues:

    "Incidentally, the argument Miller is presenting is not one he invented. It is known as Anthropic Principle which essentially states that the Universe shows signs that it was designed to support man and life as we know it."

    I am well aware of the Anthropic Principle. I accept the variant called the Weak Anthropic Principle. As phrased by Brandon Carter, this states that "We must be prepared to take account of the fact that our location in the universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers." To state that in plainer English, in order to observe a universe, we must be in a universe where we can exist. If they had let me name it, I would have called it the "True But Trivial Anthropic Principle."

    Wayne continues:

    "It makes a lot of sense that we have 4 fundamental forces that all have to be within a certain close parameter, or life as we know it couldn’t exist. The odds of this occurring for all these fundamentals is astronomical without a designer."

    If the odds against it occurring without a designer are astronomical, what are the odds against the existence of a designer who could make it occur? Perhaps those odds are even more astronomical. If you are going argue that they are not, you need to be able to provide some kind of reasonable estimate of the probability of entities capable of being designers existing. It's a little surprising to me that, given what you believe, you don't want to embrace the notion of parallel universes. A parallel universe would at least be a place for the designers to exist. Otherwise they would seem to exist "no place."

    Wayne continues:

    "Dennett tries to counter this by stating that black holes are giving birth to multiple universes and tries to equate this to organic evolution. It simply doesn’t work. Universes are simply not organic so natural selection doesn’t work here."

    I don't think that this argument originates with Dennett, but with the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin (he's another of the people at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics). Smolin's basic idea is that universes can and do give rise to other universes, but not all universes can do so successfully. I think it may have been Smolin who argued that many universes don't live long enough or grow large enough to be able to spawn new universes -- only universes that go through a phase of inflation as ours is believed to have done can do so. In effect, some universes die off without producing offspring. The ones that don't tend to produce universes like themselves. The argument is not that universes are literally biological entities, but that there could be something analogous to biological entities going on.

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  9. Wayne writes:

    "You state that the scientists presenting the hypothesis of multiple universes are high powered, but it still does not nullify the fact that they are only presenting an educated guess, not a scientific theory like evolution. Stephen Hawking is even more high powered and he believes in the big bang theory."

    True, so he rejects the idea of parallel universes of a certain type -- according to Max Tegmark's classification, "Level II universes." He apparently accepts at least to some extent the idea of "Level III" parallel universes (or so he said in 1995). Level III universes have been hypothesized to resolve a problem in quantum physics. According to this hypothesis, whenever an event might or might not occur, it both does and does not occur. The universe branches at that point, so that the event occurs in one universe, but not in the other universe. Although this occurs at the quantum level, it can have macro-level effects. For example, suppose that, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus had to make a decision as to whether to stay in Jerusalem and risk death, or whether to leave Jerusalem to avoid the risk. The Level III universe hypothesis says that he made both decisions, in different universes. So in one universe he gets crucified, and in another universe maybe he marries Mary Magdalene, has a bunch of kids, and lives out his three-score-and-ten. We happen to live in a universe in which he stayed in Jerusalem.

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  10. P.Coyle,
    You said “why not just go with designer instead of God? OK, but we could also go with creator. Still, the term God is so well known that it is understood that this being is considered the designer and/or creator. I find it interesting that you state that there could have been a designer and a separate entity that carried out the design. Since we have no way of knowing, that is as good a guess as any.
    I agree with your definition of Anthropic Principle.

    P. Coyle, you go on to present the usual argument presented by atheists which, incidentally, is a good one, and that is, if the odds against it occurring without a designer are astronomical, what are the odds against the existence of a designer who could make it occur. BTW, this is the best presentation of this argument I have heard so far. Usually, the argument is “who created the creator”. I can’t answer that except to suggest that this being is spiritual rather than matter and always existed. Incidentally, since science can only prove or disprove material things, it cannot prove or disprove a designer which is spiritual. Therefore, an atheist, like a theist is basing his beliefs on Faith.

    P.Coyle, you state that a parallel universe would at least be a place for the designers to exist. Interesting comment. I have a friend who claims to have had a vision where she meets God who deliberately shows himself in human form. He tells her that heaven is not up above but right here on earth in different plane of existence. I doubt my friend met God, but the comment of a parallel plane of existence after we die makes sense. Paul Twitchell in his book The Tiger’s Claw, goes into a trance, leaves his body and meets up with a soul guide who takes him to 7 planes of existence, each one more advanced than the other. After you die, you go to the first one, and gradually move to more and more advanced planes until you reach the ultimate one. So, there you have it, 7 parallel planes or universes.
    P.Coyle, you stated that it was Lee Smolin, not Dennett who presented the hypothesis of multiple universes with different constants. You are quite right. My mistake. I meant to say that Dennett quoted Lee Smolin. You stated that universes were spawning new universes, however Kenneth E. Miller states that Smolin said it was black holes that were the birthplace of alternate universes, and this means to Dennett that the black holes in our own universe might be, in a cosmological kind of way, the organs of reproduction from which new universes emerge. The fundamental constants of each of a black hole’s “offspring” universes are slight variations of those found in the “parent” universe, and for Dennett, this is a way out of the anthropic trap. Using Smolin’s ideas as the engine to produce a nearly infinite number of universes, Dennett reasons that sooner or later—and quite accidentally—in one of those universes the combination of laws and constants would be just right for the evolution of life, and bingo: a couple of billion years later, beings like us appear. On the surface, it sounds plausible, except that Dennett tries to equate this to organisms that reproduce, but stating that universes reproduce surely seems like a stretch. Unfortunately, Dennett must admit that we may never, even in principle, find evidence for another universe. Deprived of empirical evidence, the best he can manage is to assure his readers that his non-theistic explanation is at least as good as a theistic one. But, by writing that his explanation is just as good, Dennett unwittingly admits that the theist alternative view is as valid as well.

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  11. P.Coyle, you state in quantum physics that there could be more than one possible plan of action and that a universe could exist where that same individual, in this case Jesus, chooses a different plan of action in alternative universes. Ah, quantum physics. A fascinating subject, but the physicists admit that we may never prove it. It even states that every once in a while, when things are just right, you could even walk through a solid wall, which incidentally is something like 98% empty space. BTW, I believe the claim is that the mass that exploded in the Big Bang, was only something like a couple of cubic miles in size. Try doing the math to see how you could turn something that small, even though it has no empty space, into a universe with billions of galaxies. I cannot. For a 2 mile cube with no empty space, I get a 100 mile cube with 98% empty space. The remaining 2% would be the 2 mile cube you started with. Maybe you can explain where I am messing up the math.

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  12. Shane,
    You comment that Kenneth E. Miller’s argument appeared to be contradictory seems insightful due to what he has later stated. He tells of a story, when he was 8. about a Catholic priest stating that not a single person can tell us what makes a flower bloom. Miller goes on to state that 37 years later, science had determined what makes a flower bloom, and it didn’t require God. He goes on to state that his pastor had made a mistake. Knowing all too well that there was much in nature that science had not mastered, his pastor sought proof for the existence of God in one of those unsolved mysteries. When science could not explain how a flower blooms, he concluded "There is no proof". The pastor's mistake was knowing that science in 1956 had not yet explained the production of flowers, he accepted this as proof that it never would. But the pastor’s mistake went well beyond the bad luck of choosing a problem that would eventually be solved. He embraced the idea that God finds it necessary to cripple nature. In our pastor’s view, God would not have fashioned a consistent, self-sufficient material universe that could support the blooming of a daffodil without his direct interventions. We can find God, therefore, by looking for things around us that lack material, scientific explanations. In his own way, the parish priest had taken a page from the creationists’ book. They claim that the existence of life, the appearance of new species, and most especially the origins of mankind have not and cannot be explained by evolution or any other natural process. By undercutting the self- sufficiency of nature, they believe, we can find God (or a least a designer) in the deficiencies of science.

    The danger to both arguments is clear. Science, given enough time, has explained things that seemed baffling to the best minds of the past. That leads to the conclusion that natural phenomena will never be able to figure it out. History is against them.
    OOPS, this last statement is what I find contradictory. Miller had earlier stated that the Anthropic Principle indicated that the universe was made for our existence since certain constants had to be within a narrow parameter in order for life to exist as we know it, thus requiring the need for a designer. Seems to me that the above paragraph holds true here as well, and that Miller is falling into the same trap he describes that the creationists and his pastor did.
    One other thing. I would have felt better if Miller had not narrowed down his God to the Christian one which I find was man-made in that Jesus was telling everyone that his Father was going to arrive in glory in His Kingdom while some of them were still alive. It didn’t happen then, and so the conclusion that it is going to happen millenniums later simply does not hold water.

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  13. Wayne writes:

    "Unfortunately, Dennett must admit that we may never, even in principle, find evidence for another universe. Deprived of empirical evidence, the best he can manage is to assure his readers that his non-theistic explanation is at least as good as a theistic one. But, by writing that his explanation is just as good, Dennett unwittingly admits that the theist alternative view is as valid as well."

    I believe that it is the case that Level III universes -- universes created by the branching of our universe by quantum events -- could not communicate with each other, for reasons having to do with the way quantum mechanics works. This may imply that we may never, in principle, find evidence for the existence of Level III parallel universes, though I'm not sure. We may be able to find evidence for other kinds of parallel universes. Laura Mersini-Houghton contends that observations of the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) demonstrate "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."

    Even if we cannot obtain observational or experimental evidence of parallel universes, I question the notion that "the theist alternative view is valid as well." In this case, any claim of equal validity only means that the cosmologists, like the theists, would have presented us with an untestable hypothesis. That doesn't mean that the hypothesis of the theists is equally resonable as the hypothesis of the cosmologists -- or even a reasonable hypothesis at all.

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  14. Wayne writes:

    "Ah, quantum physics. A fascinating subject, but the physicists admit that we may never prove it."

    Quantum physics is quite well established. Just last month, researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara demonstrated experimentally for the first time that quantum mechanics applies to objects large enough to be seen with the naked eye. The head of the experimental group at UCSB described the discovery as "an important validation of quantum theory."

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  15. P. Coyle writes:
    Laura Mersini-Houghton contends that observations of the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) demonstrate "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."
    This is quite interesting. I was not aware of it. However, it, so far is simply a hypothesis by Laura to explain a huge hole found in the constellation of Eridanus of about a billion light years across. I, therefore, disagree that it demonstrates “the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own. This was only a hypothesis by one person. Still, it is mysterious what caused this huge void in the universe.
    P.Coyle writes:
    Just last month, researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara demonstrated experimentally for the first time that quantum mechanics applies to objects large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
    This is fascinating. I found the article. Thank you for mentioning it. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html
    At below 1/10 Kelvin, a paddle had no vibrational energy, but it was made to wiggle at a very specific energy . When the quantum circuit was put into superposition of ‘push’ and ‘don’t push’ and connected to the paddle, the paddle was shown to vibrate and not vibrate simultaneously. I must admit that I cannot comprehend how they could determine this or how the scientists were able to put the quantum circuit into a superposition of ‘push’ and ‘don’t push’. But, it does appear that scientists may have shown that quantum theory is valid. That is huge.

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  16. Wayne,

    My last posting, “What’s Left for God to Do?” was strictly a response to your comment, as written. I had not read a word of Kenneth Miller’s book but merely reacted to the juxtaposition of quotes from the book as they appeared in your comment. Your quotes of Miller in later comments give a much clearer and more cohesive picture of his thinking.

    Ironically a deist friend of mine phoned me a couple of days ago to say he has bought me a book he wants me to read, because (he said) it’s like what I might have written if I had been a biologist. The book is “Finding Darwin’s God” by Kenneth R. Miller. I promised him I would read it, so I’m not going to read all of your quotes from it. I’ll get them in context when I have the book in hand. Another irony is that the giver of Miller’s book is a man also named Kenneth, whom you once worked for in Subsistence.

    Shane

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  17. Shane,
    Wow! Now that really is quite a coincidence that Ken is sending you "Finding Darwin's God". I agree with Ken that it would be a book like you might have written if you were a biologist. I'm glad he is sending it to you since I really think you will find it very enlightening. I believe that it is one of the best, if not the best, book I have ever read explaining evolution. If Ken is the one I'm thinking of, he had a best buddy working for him who was a died in wool Catholic. I wonder if he knew that Ken was a Diest. I have a feeling not. Since a deist believes God set up everything in motion and then stepped aside, I guess I would be more a theist since I believe God gets involved from time to time, though I agree with Kenneth R. Miller that God could have let evolution take over. Still, fossil evidence could also be God experimenting until He got it right.

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  18. Wayne writes:

    "However, it, so far is simply a hypothesis by Laura to explain a huge hole found in the constellation of Eridanus of about a billion light years across. I, therefore, disagree that it demonstrates “the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own. This was only a hypothesis by one person. Still, it is mysterious what caused this huge void in the universe."

    With two colleagues, Mersini-Houghton had published an article eight months before the WMAP observations were made public which suggested the possibility of voids in the universe. It's a typical physics paper -- even the abstract is almost incomprehensible. What that abstract says is that "We find interesting features imprinted on the matter power spectrum P(k): power is suppressed at large scales indicating the possibility of primordial voids competing with the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect." Right, got it.

    Anyway, her claim is not just to be able to explain the Great Void, but to have predicted it. Obviously the scientific community will want to hold off a bit before endorsing that view, since her theory is not the only way to account for the void. And indeed, a couple of other scientists redid the calculations and concluded that there might not even be a void. Everyone's now awaiting results from the European Space Agency's "Planck" satellite, which will provide better data than WMAP.

    Mersini-Houghton commented that "Copernicus shocked the world by telling us that our planet isn’t at the universe’s center. We may soon find that our whole universe isn’t even at the cosmic center." She reported, presumably not coincidentally, that "she had also begun receiving Bibles in the mail from people worried about the possible religious implications of the multiverse."

    If it turns out that there actually is a void, the Bible-senders will likely argue that it was not caused by the collision of our universe with a parallel universe, but was put there by God, using his awesome and mysterious void-creating magic powers. They will claim that this argument is an explanation, not a pseudo-explanation that actually explains nothing whatsoever. And they will believe their own claim.

    Will Laura Mersini-Houghton win the Nobel Prize for physics -- or will she forfeit her immortal soul for her blasphemy?

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  19. P.Coyle,
    Thank you, the details on "the big hole" is fascinating.

    I take exception to you referring to God using his magical powers though. Especially, since there has not been yet any proof presented that two universes collided, and even if there was, it would not be necessary for a god to cause it. The thing that seems really magical is matter, all by itself, coming from nothing and than exploding in a big bang. A spiritual intelligence doing it seems less "magical" to me.

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  20. Wayne, you write:

    "I take exception to you referring to God using his magical powers though."

    Shane took exception to it as well, but then provided us with the following definition:

    “magic: (2) an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source.”

    Given that definition, my use of the term "magic" was perfectly appropriate as far as Shane's God is concerned. I'm not 100% sure about your God, since I don't know whether your God is supernatural or natural, but I'm guessing "supernatural." I think it depends on whether "spiritual intelligences" are things that you think exist in nature. I'm inclined to say they don't exist in nature, but quite frankly I have no idea what a "spiritual intelligence" is supposed to be. A mind with no brain to give rise to it?

    You continue:

    "Especially, since there has not been yet any proof presented that two universes collided, and even if there was, it would not be necessary for a god to cause it."

    Neither has there been any proof (or indeed anything that I would regard as credible evidence) presented that the universe was created.

    Your point about a god being necessary to cause branes to collide is a good one, however. Should it come to be the acceped scientific paradigm that our universe was caused by the collision of two branes, and should it be the case that the reason why the branes collided remains unexplained, that would likely be the next gap that religious folk would try to fill with their God-of-the-gaps. That's pretty much the way things have gone, and the way things are likely to go.

    You conclude.

    "The thing that seems really magical is matter, all by itself, coming from nothing and than exploding in a big bang. A spiritual intelligence doing it seems less 'magical' to me."

    I suspect that this is what our disagreeent basically comes down to. Some of us find "spiritual intelligences" to be much more magical than others do.

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  21. P.Coyle,
    I checked the definition and magic does indeed refer to supernatural force outside of nature. So I take back my statement and replace it with the statement that it seems extremely hard to believe that matter appearing out of nothing and then exploding into the big bang could have occurred without a creator. A creator may or may not be outside of nature. Either way, it seems to make more sense than it happening by itself, which appears to be impossible.
    You said “Neither has there been any proof (or indeed anything that I would regard as credible evidence) presented that the universe was created.”
    True, but neither has there been any proof presented that the universe was NOT created. Since science is stating that mass appeared from nothing and then exploded in the big bang, I am using reason that a creator seems more logical than it happening by itself. How can mass appear from nothing when there is no cause? BTW, so far, the big bang has been well accepted by the vast majority of scientists, and they have shown evidence such as galaxies moving away from one another.
    You concluded that some of us find “spiritual intelligences” to be much more magical than others do. The reason I feel that no creator involvement is harder to believe is that matter appearing out of nothing requires a cause, and that cause is a creator. Without that cause, it simply couldn’t happen.

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  22. Wayne wrote:

    "The reason I feel that no creator involvement is harder to believe is that matter appearing out of nothing requires a cause, and that cause is a creator. Without that cause, it simply couldn’t happen."

    Your position is duly noted. Let the record show that you believe that matter appeared out of nothing as a result of a feat of magic performed by an entity or entities unknown. Let the record also show that that is not my belief.

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  23. P.Coyle, your position is dutifuly noted. :-)
    Now if only we could prove who's hypothesis is the correct one.

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