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Some of the old-time creationists had a wonderfully naive story called the Omphalos argument. Omphalos is greek for navel, or belly button. Did Adam have one? Sure, said the creationists, since God wanted to create the world as a going concern. Adam was created as an adult human being, complete with a navel (which was never employed as the attachment site for an umbilical cord, since Adam had no mother, and no birth.) If Adam was created in the shade of a tree, did that tree have rings? Yes, even though the tree was created ex nihilo and had no growth seasons. Furthermore, the grassy bank contained layers of sediment that were never laid down by seasonal floods, and may even have contained, in deeper layers, fossils of creatures that never lived.
You can see how the science of natural history, under such conditions, becomes a joke. So too with laboratory science. Did the contents of the test tube turn blue because protein in the sample underwent the same reaction as in the controls, and so the blue color is evidence of the presence of a certain amount of protein? Or did the All Powerful Creator and Sustainer of the Universe have some other reason to want me to think that there was protien in the sample?
There is a Warner Brothers cartoon with Wiley Coyote, once again out to do mayhem to the road runner, in which Wiley tries to do a controlled experiment. He has a rope tied to a tree overhanging the road, and he ties a stick of dynamite to the other end and swings it out into the road. He tries longer and shorter fuse lengths, until the dynamite explodes just as it reaches the center of the road. When the road runner comes along, the rope and dynamite, with the same length of fuse that worked perfectly in the test runs, swings out over the road, over to the far side, and then back into Wiley Coyote's face before it blows up. Sorry, Wiley. In a universe beholden to an intelligent creator, be that creator God or Friz Freleng, the postulate of objectivity is a bad bet, and science, with its controlled experiments, is a crock of nonsense.
When scientists abandon the postulate of objectivity, they are led into the most bizzare contradictions. One of my favorites is from Sir John Eccles, a neurophysiologist who wrote a book on metaphysics with Karl Popper. Eccles at one point insists that life is too complex to have arisen by any process except one dependent on divine guidance and design. Only a few pages away in the same book, he criticizes the search for extra-terrestrial life, since those who believe life could exist elsewhere in the universe must simply be unaware of the extreme low probabilities associated with the origins of life. Priceless. Life is so unlikely that it must have originated by an act of God. But, at the same time, it is so improbable that even God must have been able to do it only once. I'm certain that the theologians were happy to hear that that sticky problem had been laid to rest.
In our universe, unlike that of Wiley Coyote and John Eccles, the postulate of objectivity seems to be a good bet. More than a postulate, it is a founding working hypothesis for science. An hypothesis is never tested alone -- testing can only be done on a cluster of hypotheses. That's how Baysean analysis works. There, we were testing not only the hypothesis that the can has no red quarter, but that our drawing of a quarter out of the can is a random event, and if the red quarter is there, we have an equal chance of getting it. If either hypothesis fails, then all bets are off.
So, if the postulate of objectivity, the postulate that no God is going to interfere in our experiments, is actually a hypothesis, then it is one that is part of the experimental protocol of every experiment that has ever been done. Unless there are, hidden away somewhere, experimental results that cannot be explained by any material hypothesis, results that defy interpretation by the known laws of physics or the generalizations of chemistry and biology and the rest of science, unless some strong evidence for a miracle of Biblical proportions is forthcoming; unless some paranormal event worthy of James Randi's unclaimed prize, now risen to over a half million dollars, is about to be announced to the world, then the objectivity of the universe is one of the most tested, and most highly confirmed theories in science. I dare say, the hypothesis that God does not exist, or that, if he does exist, he does not interfere in the daily affairs of the world, is better confirmed than is the hypothesis that the world is round.
You believers are sitting out there snickering up your sleeves. "There he goes," you say, "thinking that science can eliminate God." But please note that I have made no such claim. I have told you that I am a scientist, and that I believe in science, and that I believe that there is no better path to highly probable human knowledge. I have shown why I hold a belief in God to be incompatible with the process of science, and why I believe that, as a hypothisis for understanding the physical world, the God hypothesis is worthless.
However: Please note, you religious believers, that Baysian analysis can never touch your belief in God. As long as you begin with a probability of one that your God exists, possessing whatever powers you want to imagine him to have, then there is nothing that can ever touch that belief. It doesn't matter how many experiments have been done in which water didn't turn into wine, the dead didn't rise, and nobody walked on water. Since God can do anything, he can make the world look like he doesn't exist. He can make physical, chemical, and biological experiments all turn out to be compatible with a godless, material, random interpretation of the universe. He can make Adam have a belly button, and life look like an inevitable product of mindless matter. And the scientists can draw out plain old material quarters as many times as they wish, but they will still not have reduced by so much as a hairbreadth your initial belief that the probability that the Almighty red quarter is actually in there is actually one.
Fine. Be that way. But don't tell me that you can make such thinking consistent with the practice of science.
Science doesn't eliminate God for those who insist on believing in Him. But science cannot exist in a universe beholden to an intelligent creator. Science eliminated God, as a hypothesis, when it first started to take matter and observation seriously. Newton thought the observed world testified to the glory of God -- but not the Triune God of the Church of England. He secretly rejected the doctrine of the trinity, fearing that if his true beliefs were known he would lose his position at Trinity College, Cambridge. The American founding fathers, many of them of a scientific bent, considered themselves deists, and Jefferson went so far as to rewrite the New Testament, removing the parts he simply couldn't believe. And Giordano Bruno was not burned at the stake merely for promoting the Copernican explanation of the movement of the planets, but for suggesting that there were implications in this knowledge for theology.
Science is a tough thing to keep under control. Once you have a method for finding highly reliable knowledge, its hard to convince those who use it to honor the yellow hazard tape and red traffic cones set up by religious believers. Hence you have Hawking saying that if we really do ever build a final unified theory of physics, and begin to intelligently discuss the question of why there is something rather than nothing, then we will begin to know the mind of God. God, or those who presume to speak for him, may not like such cheek, but, fortunately, and hopefully permantly, we're beyond the stage where he's likely to lose his position or be burned at the stake. Personally, I'm not fond of that statement of Hawking's, either. I think, if we do reach that stage, we will know something much more important than the mythical mind of a mythical figure in a mythical creation story.
But I suspect, as have many others, believers and non- believers alike, that Hawking was speaking ironically, and having his little joke. But there are other's who are not joking, who apparently think that science is already pointing the way toward the Almighty.
Where do these scientists get the idea that science can find God? The temptation to argue that science is central to the human condition is easy to understand, but why try to bring recognition to science through the hoary metaphore of God? And where in modern science do they find gaps big enough to squeeze in God?
Well, for one place, the Big Bang. Of course the old "steady state" hypothesis left plenty of room for Godly intervention (where, after all, did all that new matter and energy come from to keep everything dynamic, yet constant?) But since the majority of cosmologists have settled on a single beginning, jokingly named the Big Bang by its detractors, both religionists of a scientific bent, and scientists with religious interests have seized upon it as an observable artifact from the first verse of Genesis. Eighteen years ago, Robert Jastrow in God and the Astronomers wrote that "The scientist has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
Sure; but they haven't climbed the mountain, and they don't know the territory. And for that matter, Hawking has since suggested that it ain't necessarily so that the expansion of the universe must imply a singularity and a sudden beginning for time and the universe. He proposes that, as we step back in the imagination to earlier and earlier times, the nature of time itself may change, so that the beginnings of the universe are bounded, but with no sharp beginning. He imagines a time diagram with an apparent beginning, but as we look closer and closer, we see that it is not a point, but a curve.
And, as sure as God made little green apples (or even surer), that new view is being touted as being even more compatible with theology than was the old sudden beginning model. Robert Russel of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences believes that Hawkings new cosmology resolves the theological dilemma of how a temporal universe could have been created by a timeless diety. Hawkings model, in which time emerges gradually, is said to be a scientific analog for Augustine's view that God created the universe with time rather than in time. Time becomes part of the divine creation, just as Augustine suggested in the fifth century.
So, once again the theologians are sitting there. Not surprising, since they have, at one time or another, occupied every pile of rocks you might want to point to.
This is yet another symptom of the inability of the "God hypothesis" to suggest anything. Continuous creation? Sounds like God. A sudden beginning? Sounds like God. A gradual beginning? Sounds even more like God. God is promoted as a necessary requirement for a stable universe with sufficient consistency for science to be able to discern natural law. And how do we know this God to exist? Why, how else do you explain all the miracles in the Bible?
But even more miraculous than sudden (or not so sudden) beginnings, is the new argument from design, better known as the cosmological principle. This comes in several flavors, the weakest being little more than a new rendition of the silly song we used to sing on the bus on high school field trips: "We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here" (to the tune of Auld Lang Syne). Seriously, this conundrum simply states that, if conditions were not conducive to life in this universe and on this planet, we, as living entities, would not be here to marvel at the fact that we are alive, since we would not, under those conditions, be alive. This places some limits on what we may expect to see in the way of fundamental constants that define the conditions of the universe. To wit, they must be compatible with life as we know it.
Of course, that hangs on a perilously thin notion of who "we" are, or might or might not have been. How about life as we do not know it? Silicon and ammonia instead of carbon and water, perhaps? Or a completely different combination of strong, weak electric and gravitational forces so that none of them is recognizable, yet still, there is energy flow, and attractions and repulsions on different scales. Who are we to say that there is no other combination that could ever produce self-organizing systems caught up in that energy flow, using it for their own ends, as does life on this earth?
The stronger notion of the Anthropic Principle simply answers the question "why should the constants be what they are," by saying, "they need to be as they are for us to be here, and our being here is part of the will of God, so the constants are as they are because it is the will of God." But There is, after all, no real closure as yet on the theoretical physical constraints that may shape the limits to those constants, making "the will of God" into an experimental program that agrees to ask no more questions. And if they are assigned randomly, we have no idea how large a universe of universes we might need, and be able to draw upon in order to find at least one that could support some kind of life, as we know it or otherwise.
Ultimately, the anthropic principle suggests nothing more than that we don't know everything. And to that, I say, as a friend of mine and fellow graduate student used to say when confronted with an experimental plan that appeared to him to be incapable of proving anything, "what is the superlative of 'so what?'"
Well, if the origins of the universe are not a suitable gap to house an infinite God, how about the order inherent in the universe, and life itself?
What! Another argument from design?? Well, yes, but this one is clothed in scientific jargon, positing that a new "force" or "principle" is needed to explain how order arises in a chaotic universe, how highly organized structures can be the product of a universe in which entropy ensures that everything, in the long run. goes downhill toward disorganization.
Stuart Kaufman, biochemist at the Santa Fe Institute, feels that randomness and natural selection cannot account for the order of life, that there must be some fundamental order- generating tendancy, an "anti-chaos" to supplement, or perhaps even replace natural selection as the driving force of evolution.
It is my opinion that Kaufman's problem is precisely that he is an anti-reductionist. He takes a perfectly ordinary phenomenon, the self-organization of complex systems in a flow of energy, and fails to see, as did Illya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, that these are driven by, and reduce to, entropy. (Unfortunately, Prigogine himself has lately been adopting some of the same rhetoric.)
This is a complex area, and there is no time here to discuss it in the detail that it deserves. I will only have time to add that I am not alone in thinking that what is going on here is an illegitimate invoking of "something else." That's what Murray Gell-Mann calls the quest at the Santa Fe Institute (which Gell-Mann helped to found) to try to find something other than entropy itself behind the local decrease in entropy characteristic of life. The "running down" of the universe toward increase in entropy is a function of the large scale system, and local exceptions are frequent, and quite normal, just as eddies are common in a country brook. Gell-Mann now suggests that there is a tendancy toward obscurantism and mystification in the study of complexity, which manefests in a search for "something else," instead of sticking to the job of understanding complexity in its context as an emergent feature of the known laws of physics.
Gell-Mann notes that "the last refuge of the obscurantists and mystifyers is self-awareness, consciousness... Again," he has said, "it's a phenomenon that appears at a certain level of complexity and presumably emerges from the fundamental laws plus an awful lot of historical circumstances. Roger Penrose," he continues, "has written two foolish books based on the long-discredited fallacy that Godel's theorem has something to do with consciousness requiring" -- pause -- "something else."
I was extremely glad to hear that Gell-Mann said that. I have read those two foolish books, and more, in which Penrose tries to make his point that human consciousness must in some way transcend the purely physical and algorithmic, in a way in which computer-based intelligence could never hope to do. Godel's theorem, as you may recall, shows that any formal system of postulates and logic that is sufficiently robust to support arithmetic is also robust enough to make statements about itself, the formal system as a whole. When it does this, it can make what are called "Godel statements," which are propositions that are undecidable within the formal system. The statement may be something like the classic case, "This system is consistent." But no finite system can attest to its own consistency, so this statement is undecidable.
Godel concludes that, while the statement is undecidable, it must be either true or false. If it is true, then the system is indeed consistent; but since it can't prove that true fact, it is incomplete. If the statement is false, then the system is indeed inconsistent, even though it is unable to prove that fact. The bottom line is that no formal system can be both complete and consistent.
Penrose, however sees things slightly differently. He contends that mathematicians are different from other mere mortals, and can somehow intuit the one "true answer" to such Godelian questions. That they can do this, while a mere machine, limited to following the formal system algorithmically, cannot, proves (he says) that human intelligence and consciousness transcends the physical, and can come up with -- "Something else."
I prefer Douglas Hofstaedter's take on overcoming the Godelian block. He says that humans simply "jump out of the system." JOTS, as he calls it, is perfectly easy and legitimate, since the formal system we were talking about is usually just a game we were playing, a formalized subset of reality, and we are perfectly free to add to it. Just invent an answer, yes or no, and go on to see if the new enlarged system can do something interesting that the old one could not. In the long run, human mind-brains are well equipped for JOTS, since they should never run out of ability to re-invent themselves by reprogramming themselves; and nothing approaching "cosmic otherness" is required.
Penrose, however, not only sees the need for "something else," he longs for it, and has even found someplace to put it -- another crack into which another scientist wants to squeeze a God of the gaps. Where is the source of otherness? Why quantum physics, of course.
This has been parodied as follows: Quantum mechanics is strange and hard to understand. Consciousness is strange and hard to understand. Therefore quantum mechanics must have something to do with consciousness.
But that's not quite fair. I think we should credit Penrose and others who have attempted the same quantum connection with a bit more intelligence than that. Penrose, by the way, is not the first to claim to find quantum wierdness in consciousness. Almost 15 years ago Fred Allen Wolf won a book award for Taking the Quantum Leap, a silly book in which the quantum state of an amine group in the guard proteins surrounding a pore in a neuronal membrane was credited with bringing quantum effects into neural events, and hence making consciousness at least as wierd as quantum mechanics. Penrose has simply moved the site of quantum wierdness into the microtubules.
Personally, I don't care where they put it. Of course, consciousness is just as wierd as quantum physics. So's the mutation of a chromosome, the flipping of a coin, or the outcome of a lot of human wars. Anything that makes decisions, puts life in the balance, and history at a cusp, must partake of quantum wierdness, because quantum physics, ultimately, is the premier source of randomness.
Exactly how quanta affect consciousness, or coins, or wars, I will leave to the imagination. As a molecular geneticist by training, I can assure you that the role of quantum mechanics in many different types of mutational events can be explicated quite rigorously.
But Penrose, Wolf, and others are not jumping on the quantum physics bandwagon because they are fans of randomness. Far from it, they reject the notion of randomness -- all that Darwinian selection that Daniel Dennet, and William Calvin, and Francis Crick, and so many others want to import from evolution into consciousness research, is precisely what Penrose wants to avoid.
So how does he do it, if in quantum mechanics, as understood in the Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, there is indeed, randomness? Answer: reject Bohr's interpretation in favor of David Bohm's, in which randomness is rejected, and wierdness is embraced.
Quantum mechanics could take us several hours. Bottom line: Bohm's and Bohr's interpretations are both, as far as I can tell, equally valid. Which you choose is a question of taste. The best explication of the logical differences I have seen was in an article ten years ago or so in Scientific American, by Bernard D'Espagnat. He boiled down the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen thought experiment, and Bell's theorem, and the data just then coming in (with more since) that vindicated the quantum result as opposed to the classical prediction, to three simple choices.
The facts are, that a system of quantum-correlated particles does not operate as a classical derivation would predict. That must mean that one of the assumptions in the classical derivation must be mistaken. What are these assumptions? First is logic. D'Espagnat waves his hands and hopes that we don't have to abandon logic. I have since seen some papers that I don't pretend to understand that claim that giving up logic in favor of one or more kinds of "quantum logic" that have been proposed is really logically equivalent to the abandonment of one or the other of the two propositions D'Espagnat names as the other two classical assumptions, one of which has got to go.
One solution is to abandon what is called "naive realism," the notion that a particle, prior to being measured, does have absolute properties, as, for example, position and momentum. In this, Bohr's interpretation, a precise position and momentum do not emerge until a measurement is taken (or, more correctly, a position and momentum with precision appropriate to the method of measurement.) There will be some uncertainty involved, that will be shared between the correlated, complementary properties but that uncertainty is, in its totality, ineradicable.
The other solution is to abandon what D'Espagnat calls "Einstein separability," the article of faith that says that no two particles in the universe can have an effect on each other that propogates faster than the speed of light. Here, the position and momentum of a particle do exist before they are measured, but the information that comprises them are spread accross all the particles in the universe with which our particle in question may ever have come into close enough contact to share a quantum correlation. What we may see as randomness in our interpretation of the imprecision in our measurement is actually a reflection of our ignorance of all this information, an ignorance that is enforced by the fact that many of the particles involved may be light years away, while their status, including events happening to them right now, must affect our particle in question here and now, without the benefit of a light-speed signal of any kind.
Ok, I'll buy that. We either have real randomness, as the universe makes up at least part of its reality on the spot, or that reality is actually completely determined, but part of that determination is hidden from us in the farthest reaches of space and time. In either case, there are things happening in the universe, here and now, which we cannot predict by any method. What difference does it make whether they really are random, or they just look that way?
I'll tell you what difference it makes. Back in the 1950's there was a standup comic who used to appear semi-regularly on the Ed Sullivan Show, who made a running gag out of his descriptions of people making fools of themselves by attempting the impossible. They should know bletter. They are simply not competent to do this, to explain this, to understand what is going on here. At this point he would pause for dramatic effect, as the audience knew what was coming next. "I, however," he would begin, and proceed to explain his own expertise at whatever endeavor he was discussing.
The difference between Bohrs admonition that we do not speak of the unspeakable, and Bohm's sequestering of hypothetical information in the "absolute elsewhere," as the part of space-time that cannot affect us by light-speed signals has been called, is that the information is unavailable by any means known to physics. The religious, believing scientist is vindicated. Those physical scientists who deal in nothing but matter and energy should know thier limits. Now, since the wierdness of the quantum has been connected to that of the mind, where our morals, and our meaning find their roots, we can see clearly why science, mere physics, concerned with the material world of the here and now, is incompetent in so many areas. You know the list: faith, hope charity, kindness, imagination, consolation, salvation, joy, conscience, love of truth, genius, courage. "Now," says the religious, believing scientist, "I can see why it is that those purely physical scientists, who know nothing of the quantum significance of the neural microtubules, should know better than to make any pronouncements in these areas." (Pause) "I, however..."
By pretending that the information does exist, somewhere in the great absolute elsewhere, those who claim to posses a great and uncommon sensitivity (a claim which is all too common among the religious), those who profess an ability, like that claimed by Penrose, to intuit the truth, even when it is undecidable, can claim to have a scientifically respectable justification for telling the rest of us how to run our lives.
Why do they do it? Why do they try to pretend that science justifies a leap into the irrational? For a hoped-for cosmic meaning, for belonging, for a personal relationship with the infinite, to gain an imagined cosmic purpose, when they can see no point in building their own real local purpose. Most of all, it is because of the moral argument. Science must be kept in its place, and not allowed to subsume all of humanity into its explanitory web, for the same shortsighted and specious reason that the Platonists rejected the atomic theory of their day: If Athenian citizens are nothing more than matter, then why tell the truth, and why fight for Athens? If modern mankind is material, shaped by the forces of chance and necessity, what reason does he have not to lie, rape, pilliage and kill?
When I was in graduate school, I had a friend who was asked exactly that question by her Christian roommate, when she found out that my friend was an atheist. "Why aren't you out robbing banks then, if you really don't believe in God and Love?" Because love is not the exclusive territory of believers in God, and, my friend told her, "because bank robbery would not be consistent with my plans to become a biochemist."
Science is rejected and dismissed, and falsely labeled as "value free," Far from being value free, science is a value system, based on a faith in the value of material understanding, and in a social commitment to telling the truth, a commitment more stringent and more self-policing than any commandment. In contrast we have a society that pretends to live by religious morality, based in miracle stories and a myth that holds that the human ideas recorded two and three thousand years ago were not really human, but were inspired by the maker of the very fabric of the universe.
Which one, I put it to you, is better qualified to shape the ethics of the 21st century: a system that calls for faith in the potential of human beings, as best we can come to understand what that is, and a commitment to individuals telling the truth and taking responsibility for their own beliefs; or a system that takes human ideas, wraps them in a flimflam game as old as civilization, and then pretends that modern humans can live morally by following a set of beliefs for which no human will take responsibility or admit authorship?
For how many more millenia will we continue to claim to be moral animals, while pretending that we are merely responsible to, but not for, our morality.
Thank you.
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