The anthropic principle revisited

This month's issue of Seed alerted me to something that I have mentioned before and think may just destroy the factual basis of the fine-tuning argument for a God's existence. Imagine that instead of arguing that the physical constants are fine-tuned so that they cannot be independently varied, we actually did a mathematical analysis of them to see how the ratios of the constants could be changed but still produce life. In a peer-reviewed article entitled, "Limitations of anthropic predictions for the cosmological constant Λ: cosmic heat death of anthropic observers", Fred C. Adams at Michigan looked at the relationships of gravity and the nuclear forces as fundamental physical constants and found that so long as these are varied together, they produce a number of star-sustaining, and therefore life-sustaining, physical universes.

In this latter case, the bounds on a Λ [the cosmological constant] can be millions of times larger than previous estimates—and the observed value. We thus conclude that anthropic reasoning has limited predictive power.

Theists often use the anthropic principle to argue in favor of an intelligent designer of the universe. Given that the idea of the argument precludes the designer being a part of the universe, this is all but arguing for the existence of God, not just some alien somewhere. The argument usually goes, "If you changed the force of gravity by even one-quadrillionth of a N, then life couldn't exist..."

You can view this sort of argument here and here by Collins. A substantive reply to Collins' argument follows:

Collins is more persuasive, although certainly not original, when trotting out the Anthropic Principle, the argument that the universe is uniquely pre-tuned to bring about life in general and human life in particular. There are a number of physical constants and laws such that if any had been even slightly different, life might well have been impossible. For example, for roughly every billion quarks and antiquarks, there is an excess of one quark – otherwise, no matter. If the rate of expansion immediately after the Big Bang had been a teeny tiny fraction smaller than it was, the universe would have recollapsed long ago. If the strong nuclear forces holding atomic nuclei together had been just a smidgeon weaker, then only hydrogen would exist; if a hair stronger, all hydrogen would promptly have become helium, and the solar furnaces inside stars –which we can thank for the heavier elements – would never have existed.

Both Dawkins and Sagan also examine this argument, which Dawkins caricatures as "god-as-dial-twiddler." It is oddly tautological, in that if the universe were not as it is, we indeed would not be here to wonder about it. In Fred Hoyle's science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, it is explained that the probability of a golf ball landing on any particular spot is exceedingly low – and yet, it has to land somewhere! The Anthropic Principle can also be "solved" by multiple universes, of which ours could simply be the one in which we exist; this might apply not only to horizontally existing multi-verses, but to the same one occurring differently in time if there have been (and will be) unending expansions and contractions. Moreover, it isn't at all clear that the various physical dials are independent, or that the physical constants in the universe could be any different, given the nature of matter and energy.

This is a typical response to the theistic position --

1) pointing out that improbable events happen all the time without being of divine origin: each seven-card hand dealt in stud poker has a probability of (1/52*1/51*1/50*1/49*1/48*1/47*1/46) = 1 in 674,274,182,400. But does that make it a miracle?
2) questioning whether the constants can be changed at all, or if they are primally fixed by the nature of the universe
3) invoking the multiverse to reduce the significance of any one universe's "uniqueness" in a statistical sense (also see here)

But from a scientist's standpoint, it's much more interesting to wonder what ratios and relationships amongst the physical constants would still produce life if they were varied interdependently. And that's the question that has been answered by Fred Adams. There are many configurations of the constants that, when varied together, still produce life-friendly, or "Goldilocks"-zone universes. This makes the anthropic principle much less interesting. Yet another reason to give up on the idea of a God.

William Lane Craig on Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate Boeing 747" Argument

A caveat first: I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins or The God Delusion. However, Richard Dawkins brings up a good argument, "the ultimate Boeing 747 argument" in his last book, The God Delusion: it's basically the idea that if the complexity of the universe requires a designer, then the complexity of the designer becomes the next focus for argument. Fred Hoyle once famously said that abiogenesis was like claiming a tornado could hit a junkyard and assemble a working 747. The implication is that life is very complex (like a Boeing 747), and thus it couldn't have come about without another (intelligent) cause.

Dawkins' response: If complex things require intentionality or causation, then what about God? Isn't God more complex than the universe, given that God is capable of creating the universe? The basic response to this argument has so far been to claim that, no, in fact God is simple...just as William Lane Craig responds to Dawkins':

So Dawkins' argument for atheism is a failure even if we concede, for the sake of argument, all its steps. But, in fact, several of these steps are plausibly false. Take just step (3), for example. Dawkins' claim here is that one is not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because then a new problem arises: who designed the designer?

This rejoinder is flawed on at least two counts. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn't be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn't be able to explain the designer.

Secondly, Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine designer of the universe, the designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations; for example, how simplicity is to be weighted in comparison with other criteria like explanatory power, explanatory scope, and so forth. But leave those questions aside. Dawkins' fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine designer is an entity comparable in complexity to the universe. As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable quantities and constants, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—, but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind's ideas, which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that is worth.

On Craig's first point, the problem is that Intelligent Design Creationism is a joke, as it doesn't "detect" anything. Furthermore, although there are parallels in detecting intelligence from archeology, because we know what humans do and what to look for, the sort of intelligent designer implied by IDC is supernatural. Given that IDC also claims that our place in the cosmos is "privileged" -- the anthropic principle -- this would require the "designer" to have tuned the very physical constants that any naturalistic designer would be controlled by. Unlike in archeology, where we find artifacts that we can reliably infer intelligence or design in, as we have a basis for comparison (ourselves) with which we are intimately familiar, the "designer" in IDC would be so alien and preternatural as to remove our capability to even recognize its handiwork.

On Craig's second point, I think that it is Craig who is confused. Craig claims that a divine mind would be "an advance in simplicity" -- but this refers to philosophical economy: Ockham's razor, if you will. However, in addressing Dawkins' argument, Craig claims that an "unembodied mind" is somehow a simple entity. The problem with this argument is that even if I were to grant that an unembodied mind could exist, which is problematic, God is able to create a physical universe, and thus cause it to exist, in addition to thinking it. Furthermore, Craig's God not only creates the universe ex nihilo, He interacts with it and even becomes physical within it. If these things don't make God more complex than the product of His creation, then what could?

If something or someone X can create something or someone Y, then alter its properties post creation, then selectively become part of Y in a controlled manner, and none of these things can occur from Y -> X, but only from X -> Y, is X not more complex and less simple than Y?

I think Craig's premise is not only unsupported, but is almost self-evidently false: X is more complex than Y, and Craig's God is more complex than the universe it creates, alters, becomes one with...&c.

Therefore, Dawkins' argument stands: appealing to the argument from design in saying that complexity demands simplicity does not get us anywhere when the designer is purported to be more complex than that which is designed!

Breakthrough evidence for string theory?

Having always been a fan of cosmology, and especially the cyclic model, a recent New Scientist article on the giant "hole" in the universe and how it may support string theory caught my eye. I took the time to scan and upload it so that you can read it too: here (.pdf, 3.1 MB).

Nice resource on cosmology

I've been a fan of Steinhardt's for some time now, and his new book Endless Universe is now on my reading list. He's a proponent of the cyclic model of the universe, and he's in good company these days.

Check out this CBC radio program (.mp3 here) on cosmology, too, while you're at it.

The Advance of the Cyclic Model of Cosmology

I find this very exciting.

I was recently discussing Hilbert's Hotel with a theist, and I said the following:

As for time, that problem is basically unsolved either way. You claim that an "actual infinity" exists -- God -- while philosophers claim that an actual infinity exists -- causation. No one thinks that space-time is infinite from the singularity to now, the question is about what the singularity represents (a breakdown in our understanding).

One of the two following things is true:
there is an infinite chain/cessation of cause and effect (p)
-or-
there is not (~p)

We may write:
1) All things have a cause (p)
2) Some things, or one thing, are uncaused (~p)

Even if we assume that p is impossible, the problem is in proving the case that God is the uncaused thing, versus the set of all existents (the universe).

Also, most people aren't aware of this, but the resurrection of the cyclic universe model came in recent times. What allowed it is advances in our understanding of particle physics and mathematics, brought on by investigations into supersymmetry and string theory. The original paper was in the highly-respected journal Science.

The physicist Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Princeton, on the cyclic universe and "before the big bang" at his webpage. Steinhardt co-wrote the original papers with Neil Turok of Cambridge. On Steinhardt's website, he has a very useful FAQ that deals extensively with the technical issues involved, especially the question of entropy. His reply to critiques from physicists is also useful.

These arguments are light-years ahead of public awareness. They present a serious and viable challenge to the old concept of the "singularity", without contradicting the vast evidence to support the Standard Model (aka the "Big Bang"). Both models (cyclic and big bang) are compatible throughout 99.999999999999999...% of the universe's existence, only in "the beginning" and "the end" do they diverge.

But it is with that tiniest fraction, of course, that we are fascinated.

I also have some layman-oriented (sort of) papers on the cyclic model and the long-standing issues with trying to understand the nature of the singularity, and fixing the long-standing issues with the standard model:

1. Seed article by Steinhardt -- link
   
2. A summary of issues with the cyclic universe -- link
   
3. A physicist's take on the issues with the big bang and their solutions with a cyclic model -- link

More technical papers:

1. 2003 Nuclear Physics paper -- link
   
2. 2004 bouncing universes with varying constants -- link
   

Please note that these are peer-reviewed papers in respected journals, not mere pop-sci.

Get in on the conversation here.

"Biology and Bullshit"

I found a rather long but very good review of 12 books on science and religion, along with social commentary, at the Richard Dawkins' site. The review is by David P. Barash, psychology professor and author of Madame Bovary's Ovaries: a Darwinian look at literature and is entitled "Biology and Bullshit".

He is obviously coming from a left-leaning/secular viewpoint, but I think he does a good job of summarizing the factual points of the books and some social issues that have spurred them on. He lets his interpretation of the worthiness of those points shine through, but the reviews are valuable for those who have considered texts on science and religion. I have only modified some formatting, and added B&N links to all the books. (For those of you who don't know it, Amazon is a majority GOP contributor, while B&N gives them nada; I'm going to stop supporting the former altogether, and you should too.) Read it there or read it below:

Biology and Bullshit
by David P. Barash, posted 2/24/07

Books Discussed in this Essay:

• Religion Explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought, by Pascal Boyer. (Basic Books, 2002)
• The Language of God: a scientist presents evidence for belief, by Francis Collins. (The Free Press, 2006)
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett. (Viking Press, 2006)
• Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. (Knopf, 2006)
• Evolving God: a provocative view of the origins of religion, by Barbara King. (Doubleday, 2007)
• Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion, by L. A. Kirkpatrick. Guilford Publications, 2005.
• Evolution and Christian Faith: reflections of an evolutionary biologist, by Joan Roughgarden. (Island Press, 2006)
• The Varieties of Scientific Experience: a personal view of the search for god, by Carl Sagan. (The Penguin Press, 2006)
• Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson. (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
• The Creation: an appeal to save life on earth, by Edward. O. Wilson. (W. W. Norton, 2006)
• Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the evolutionary origins of belief, by Lewis Wolpert. (W. W. Norton, 2007)
  

All books supporting religion are alike. All books attacking it do so in their own way (well, maybe not, but doesn't this start us off on a nice Tolstoyan note?). In any event, religion's interface with science - long fraught - seems especially so these days, with a bevy of books criticizing religion as well as defending it.

Why so much attention, just now? Exhibit A: creationist efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution, masquerading as "intelligent design." Next, the takeover of the US executive branch by right-wing ayatollahs, combined with presidential assertions that his policies are undertaken in furtherance of god's will, not to mention efforts to break down the Jeffersonian "wall of separation" between church and state. Add to this the so-called war on terror, which is largely a struggle with radical Islam in response to the latter's faith-based initiative against the United States.

Meanwhile, American stem-cell research continues to be hobbled by the insistence that every fertilized cell has been "ensouled" and is therefore human and holy. And don't forget the conspicuous rise of the right-wing evangelical movement in the United States – bastion of religiosity in the developed world - featuring such gems as Pat Robertson's assertion that catastrophes, from natural hurricanes to unnatural terrorism, are brought about by god's displeasure with the sexually or textually sinful.

In short, it is fair to say that "they" (religious zealots) started it, as they usually do. It was the Catholic Church that burned Bruno and persecuted Galileo, not the other way around. When have atheists claimed that religious devotees will burn in hell, or sought to hurry them along not with words but flaming faggots? Polls consistently show Americans more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is an anencephalic ax murderer (but religious) than the most admirable atheist. In any event, it appears that despite – or, perhaps, because of – being an oppressed minority, some atheists are finally madder than hell (and/or mad at hell) and unwilling to "take it" any more.

In his 2003 book, The End of Faith, Sam Harris pointed out that alone of all human assertions, those qualifying as "religious," almost by definition, automatically demand and typically receive immense respect, even veneration. Claim that the Earth is flat, or that the Tooth Fairy exists, and you will be deservedly laughed at. But maintain that according to your religion, a 6th century desert tribal leader ascended to heaven on a winged horse, and you are immediately entitled to deference. (By the way, is the similar claim that a predecessor ascended to heaven, roughly 600 years earlier, without aid of a winged horse less ridiculous … or more?) It has long been, let us say, an article of faith that at least in polite company, religious faith – belief without evidence – should go unchallenged. Much of the recent uproar comes from just such challenging, among which biologists have been prominent.

Like Mark Twain's celebrated comment about stopping smoking, scholars have found it easy to explain religion: they've done it hundreds of times, in psychological, psychoanalytic, sociological, historical, anthropological and economic terms. Biologists, by contrast, have been Johnnies-come-lately, a neglect that has been changing of late, as growing numbers seek to explore the evolutionary factors – the likely "adaptive significance" – of religion. Indeed, given that religion is, in one form or another, a cross-cultural universal, that it has had such powerful effects on human beings (for good and ill), and yet its biological underpinnings remain so elusive, religion is an especially ripe topic for biologists' scrutiny.

It would seem both a fertile field and a frustrating one. Thus, on the one hand, religious belief of one sort of another seems to qualify as a cross-cultural universal, therefore suggesting that it might well have emerged, somehow, from the cross-cultural universality of human nature, the common evolutionary background shared by all Homo sapiens. But on the other, it often appears that religious practice is fitness-reducing rather than enhancing; if so, then genetically mediated tendencies toward religion should have been selected against. Think of the frequent religious advocacy of sexual restraint (not uncommonly, outright celibacy), of tithing, self-abnegating moral duty and other seeming diminutions of personal fitness, along with the characteristic denial of the "evidence of our senses" in favor of faith in things asserted but not clearly demonstrated. What might be the fitness-enhancing benefits of religion that compensate for these costs? The question itself is novel: social scientists, for example, have long considered religion as a thing sui generis, not as a behavioral predisposition that arose because in some way it contributed to the survival and reproduction of its participants.

For Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), as well as Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), religion is primarily the misbegotten offspring of memes that promote themselves in human minds: essentially, religion as mental virus, and thus, something adaptive for "itself" and not for its "victims." Or it could be a nonadaptive byproduct of something adaptive in its own right. For example, children seem hard-wired to accept parental teaching, since such input is likely to be fitness-enhancing ("This is good to eat," "Don't pet the saber-tooth," and so forth). This, in turn, makes children vulnerable to whatever else they are taught ("Respect the Sabbath," "Cover your hair") as well as – if we are to believe Freud, in The Future of an Illusion – downright needy when it comes to parent-like beings, leading especially to the patriarchal sky-god of the Abrahamic faiths.

Anthropologist Weston La Barre developed a similar argument, in Shadow of Childhood, going on to propose that prayer is unique to our species, resulting from our prolonged, neotonous, developmental trajectory: "No other animal when in distress or danger magically commands or prayerfully begs the environment to change its nature for the organism's specific benefit. Calling upon the 'supernatural' to change the natural is an exclusively human reaction. … [O]ne doubts that even herding animals like the many antelope species in Africa have gods they call upon when they fall behind the fleeing herd and are about to be killed by lions, wild dogs, cheetahs or hyenas. Antelope infancy and parenthood do not present such formative extravagancies. And in the circumstances the belief itself would be highly maladaptive."

For Dawkins in particular, religious belief is not only maladaptive – and unjustified – but, given the susceptibility of young children to adult indoctrination, the very teaching of religion to defenseless children is a form of child abuse! Other hypotheses of religion as maladaptive include anthropologist Pascal Boyer's grandly titled Religion Explained, which essentially argues that natural selection would have favored a mechanism for detecting "agency" in nature, enabling its possessor to predict who is about to do what (often, to whom). Since false positives would be much less fitness-reducing than false negatives (i.e., better to attribute malign intent to a tornado – and thus take cover – than to assume it is benign and suffer as a result) selection would promote hypersensitivity, or "overdetection," essentially a hair-trigger system whereby motive is attributed not only to other people, and mastodons, but also trees, hurricanes, or the sun. Add, next, the benefit of "decoupling" such predictions from the actual presence of the being in question ("What might my rival be planning right now?") and the stage is set for attributing causation to "agents" whose agency might well be entirely imagined.

Boyer's work, in turn, converges on that of Stewart Guthrie, whose 1995 book, Faces in the Clouds, made a powerful case for the potency of anthropomorphism, the human tendency to see human (or human-like) images in natural phenomena. This human inclination has morphed into a more specific, named phenomenon: pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none exists (some recent, "real" examples: Jesus's face in a tortilla, the Virgin Mary's outline in a semi-melted hunk of chocolate, Mother Teresa's profile in a cinnamon bun.)

Not all biologically based hypotheses for the evolution of religion are negative, however. In Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson explores the possibility that religious belief is advantageous for its practitioners because it contributes to solidarity – including but not limited to moral codes – that benefits the group and wouldn't otherwise be within reach. This notion, appealing as it might be, is actually a logical and mathematical stretch for most biologists, relying as it does upon "group selection." The problem is that even if groups displaying a particular trait do better than groups lacking it, selection acting within such groups should favor individuals who "cheat." Mathematical models have shown that group selection can work, in theory, but only if the differential survival of religious groups more than compensates for any disadvantage suffered by individuals within each group. It is at least possible that human beings meet this requirement, especially when it comes to religion, since within-group self-policing could maintain religiosity; it certainly did during the Inquisition.

Biologist Lewis Wolpert seeks to examine the penchant for faith in a book whose title derives from an interchange between Alice and the Red Queen, in which the latter points out that "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Wolpert describes and interprets various widespread logical fallacies, examining their diverse origins in brain pathology, neurochemical impacts, and other cognitive limitations, seeking to understand why so many people, in the words of H. L. Mencken, "believe passionately in the palpably not true." His book is a useful compendium of hallucinations, confabulations and other self-delusions, with the intriguing added thesis that much science is itself counter-intuitive (the Earth going round the sun rather than vice versa, the fact that even a demonstrably solid object is mostly empty space, the mutability of species, quantum "weirdness," etc.)

Wolpert maintains that "true causal reasoning" is unknown among other animals and often highly flawed in our own species. Yet, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out, people simply cannot look at the world "in dumb astonishment or blind apathy," so they struggle for explanations – objectively valid or not - resulting inevitably in beliefs. Wolpert then suggests that "those with such beliefs most likely did better." But the bulk of Six Impossible Things … details inaccurate beliefs: How might the holders of false beliefs "do better"? (In short, what is the adaptive significance?) One possibility is that faith in miracles, in golden plates upon which divine wisdom has been inscribed, or in the reality of bright blue elephant-headed gods are not false after all. Another is that such faith has beneficial by-products, like placebo. For now, it isn't clear how attachment to one or many gods actually paid off, since, although a deity may have turned water into wine and helped bring down the walls of Jericho in the distant past, such parent-like beneficence hasn't been reliably documented in recent millennia.

Primatologist and anthropologist Barbara King enters the fray with Evolving God, a knowledgeable, readable, and entertaining excursion into the prehistory of religion, with a refreshing orientation toward nonhuman primates as well as early hominids; Evolving God also has the added merit of pushing beyond the Abrahamic "big three," including a handy account of religious archeology. King's touchstone is "belongingness," that "[h]ominids turned to the sacred realm because they evolved to relate in deeply emotional ways with their social partners, because the resulting mutuality engendered its own creativity and generated increasingly nuanced expressions of belongingness over time, and because the human brain evolved to allow an extension of this belongingness beyond the here and now."

King is convincing about the merits and allure of belongingness, but less so – indeed, she is distressingly silent - when it comes to the adaptive significance of cozying up to the ineffable. If, as she suggests, "at bedrock is the belief that one may be seen, heard, protected, harmed, loved, frightened, or soothed by interaction with God, gods, or spirits," then what in the real world of biology and reproductive fitness has anchored human biology to this bedrock? A feeling of belongingness sounds nice, as does one of cheerfulness, or the contentment that comes from having a full belly … but to be adaptive, one ought to have a genuinely full belly. By the same token, there is little doubt that many people derive consolation from religion, but it would little avail our ancestors, confronted by a saber-tooth, to be consoled by a faith-based certainty that it is really a pussy cat, or that to be mauled by said feline guarantees a rapid ascent to heaven – especially if it makes such ascent more likely! No matter how exalted, feelings divorced from reality can be dangerous delusions.

King is quick to dismiss a "genetic approach" to understanding the evolution of religiosity, heaping what may be appropriate scorn on Dean Hamer's simplistic, over-hyped claim for The God Gene. But the author of Evolving God doesn't seem to realize that any evolutionary approach is necessarily, at its heart, a genetic one. We must conclude, sadly, that a convincing evolutionary explanation for the origin of religion has yet to be formulated. Such an account, were it to arise, would doubtless be unconvincing to believers in any event, because whatever it postulated, it would not conclude that religious belief arose because (1) it simply represents an accurate perception of god, like identification of a predator or of a prospective mate, or (2) it was installed in the human mind and/or genome by god, presumably for his glory and our counter-evidentiary enlightenment.


David Hume began his essay, The Natural History of Religion (1757) as follows: "As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature." So far, we've been concerned with religion's "origin in human nature." Next, it's "foundation in reason."

The four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse are Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Sagan. All are (or in the case of Carl Sagan, who died in 1996, were) passionate advocates of reason, committed to the proposition that religion is essentially unreasonable.

Sagan delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1985, and we can all be grateful that they are finally available in print; only slightly updated by Ann Druyan, Sagan's wisdom is fresh and relevant today, offering the humane, courageous, and rational vision that became the astronomer's trademark. We owe much to Carl Sagan, not least his Sisyphean efforts at banishing scientific illiteracy and his tireless exhortations in favor of basic planetary hygiene, all abundantly on display in The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Readers will want to join me, as well, in offering a posthumous thank you to Sagan for acquainting us with Rupert Brooke's hilarious poem, "Heaven." (It's too long to quote here, but, as Casey Stengel used to say, you can look it up – on the Web.)

William James delivered an earlier set of Gifford Lectures, turning them into his renowned The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he defined religion as a "feeling of being at home in the Universe." Carl Sagan certainly had that sense and labored, with great success, to share it. His Varieties leave no doubt that for Sagan, this feeling leaves little or no room for religion, a point he makes with extraordinary grace and often, laugh-out-loud humor.

Carl Sagan is associated with the assertion that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," a dictum applicable not only to various assertions of the paranormal, but to religion as well … assuming that one has the chutzpah to subject such claims to critical scrutiny. Bertrand Russell, for example, once asked how we might respond to someone's heartfelt assertion that a perfect China teapot, too small to be detected, was in elliptical orbit between the Earth and Mars. Whose responsibility, for example, would it be to "prove" it? And if the teapot's non-existence could not be verifiably ruled out, does this mean that claims in its favor must be granted equal plausibility with the alternative, null hypothesis?

These and other issues are also confronted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, whose overt hostility to religion, combined with the brashness and brilliance of his writing, has evoked fury among the faithful and consternation among the decorous. He has the effrontery to dispatch various "proofs" of god's existence: those of Aquinas, Anselm, and what he calls the arguments from beauty, from personal experience, from scripture, and from admired religious scientists. He also tackles the evolution of religion and what's bad about the "good book," while disputing the claim that religion is necessary for morality, all the while pulling no punches about why he is so unabashedly hostile to religion. (Honestly, is there anything hostile about suggesting that "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully"?)

Most effective is Dawkins' chapter titled "Why there almost certainly is no god," which not only sheds logical light on the so-called anthropic principle and the "worship of gaps," but – not surprisingly for a renowned evolutionary biologist – demolishes (yet again) the hoary "argument from design." This chestnut has had numerous stakes driven through its heart, but like a cinematic version of the undead, it keeps resurrecting itself, staggering, zombie-like and covered with flies, back into public view. Dawkins confronts the version concocted by renowned astronomer Fred Hoyle, who evidently knew more about stars than about evolution. According to Hoyle, the probability of living things having been created by a completely chance process is about that of a windstorm, blowing through a junkyard, spontaneously creating a Boeing 747.

Dawkins agrees that indeed, chance alone would not be up to the task but then shows, painstakingly, that natural selection is precisely the opposite of chance: its an extraordinarily efficient way of generating extreme nonrandomness. Moreover, god as ultimate explanatory device for complexity is especially depauperate since we cannot credibly maintain that god is less complex than a Boeing 747. In short, god, for Dawkins, is "the ultimate 747": insofar as the problem is explaining complexity, it hardly suffices to posit, as a satisfactory answer, the spontaneous and uncaused existence of something infinite orders of magnitude more complex.

Dawkins grants that god cannot be conclusively disproved, but he also urges that religion not be granted any special benefit of doubt. "if by 'God,' wrote Carl Sagan, "one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity." Dawkins adds that "The metaphysical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason."

The boilerplate, and politically safe if intellectually craven stance on science and religion has long been that the two are independent domains, the former telling what is and the latter, why (this was the gravimen of Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages, which argued for "nonoverlapping magesteria" between science and religion). Part of the attention-grabbing novelty of the Four Horsemen has been their refusal to abide by this dichotomy, their insistence that when religion makes egregiously false "truth claims" against science, it must be confronted, and that, moreover, religion itself can and should be "naturalized," that is, subjected to the same scrutiny that science brings to other phenomena.

This project is especially intense for America's most biologically astute philosopher, Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell involves breaking the taboo against looking skeptically and scientifically at religion. He doesn't like what he sees. And for Sam Harris (a graduate student in neurobiology when not endeavoring to épater les religieux) there is a felt need to take the United States in particular by the scruff of its neck and rub its nose in the dangers and absurdities of religious belief. His Letter to a Christian Nation was written in response to criticisms leveled by believers, following his earlier antireligious pronouncement, The End of Faith. His Letter is aptly named: more a letter than a book (perhaps coincidentally, many of the volumes herein considered are very slender). In both books, Harris is especially provocative in condemning not only religious excess, but even religious tolerance as, essentially, a "gateway drug" that opens the door not only to faith (irrationality, as Harris sees it) but also to its more extreme and violent manifestations. It would be interesting to see if, as the result of the recent drumbeat of antireligious books, the number of out-of-the-closet atheists increases, as others feel more validated in publicly affirming their unbelief … or if, turned off by the vehemence of the opponents, the ranks of faithful actually increases.

In any event, Harris is especially incensed at the consequences of what he views as religious extremism, and whereas The End of Faith was especially critical of Islam – although not sparing of Christianity or Judaism – Letter is explicitly concerned with fundamentalist Christianity and is unyielding in its alarm and disdain:

[I]f the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen—the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. … The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

Reacting to what he saw as the excesses of the Enlightenment, William Blake wrote his great poem, "Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau," which continued: "Mock on, mock on: 'tis all in vain!/ You throw the sand against the wind,/ And the wind blows it back again," and ends: "The Atoms of Democritus/ And Newton's Particles of Light/ Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,/ Where Israel's tents do shine so bright."

It has been said that the 20th century was dominated by physics, and the 19th, by chemistry and geology. The 21st? - at least, so far? Biology: with genomics, cloning, stem-cell research, neurobiology and evolutionary biology having replaced "rocket science" as emblematic of difficult/important. It is therefore notable – and not surprising – that biologists have been so much in the vanguard of science looking at religion, and that, moreover, other biologists have also been prominent in responding to the current, biology-inspired Enlightenment Redux. Instead of those Atoms of Democritus and Newton's Particles of Light, we have Darwin's evolution by natural selection and Dawkins' selfish genes. Mock on, mock on, Dawkins and Harris, Dennett and Sagan … Francis Collins and Joan Roughgarden have picked up Blake's mantle, pitching their bright, shining tents against the vain sands of your disbelief.

While the Four Horsemen resort to a modern version of Kant's sapere aude ("dare to know"), Collins and Roughgarden dare to believe, and to bespeak their faith. At the same time, neither are strangers to scientific knowing: Collins is a renowned medical geneticist, head of the Human Genome Project, and Roughgarden, a mathematical ecologist and evolutionary theorist. In The Language of God, Collins shares his personal journey from atheist to Evangelical Christian. (Throughout this extended Road-to-Damascus moment, C. S. Lewis – whose misogyny and militarism Collins delicately ignores – features prominently.) Collins is no fundamentalist, however; he acknowledges the consilience of modern evolutionary science, arguing passionately and effectively that "New Earth Creationists" do not only science but their own faith a disservice by denying reason and evidence. He approvingly quotes Galileo: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." But he also claims that "The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation." (And here I thought it cries out for physics.)

Collins argues that his faith comes primarily from two sources, the existence of what he calls "the Moral Law," and the "universal human longing for God." As to the former, is there really one – the - Moral Law? Some people feel it is lawful to suppress and kill those who disagree with them, or to worship idols, mutilate their genitals (typically with religious sanction), or define themselves as the only true human beings. Collins is greatly impressed, nonetheless, that people have a single, deep, shared knowledge of right and wrong, which he might find less impressive if he were more familiar with basic sociobiology. Thus, Collins seems not to understand that infanticidal male behavior in langur monkeys does not preclude the use of "altruism" at other times, and by other species, as a means of mate attraction, or that the evolutionary biology of altruism via kin selection is based on identity of genes via common descent, not just in ants but in any sexually reproducing organisms. Taken together or in various combinations, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, third-party effects, courtship possibilities, as well as simple susceptibility to social and cultural indoctrination - to which one might add the Kantian Categorical Imperative - provide biologists with more than enough for a Laplacean conclusion: god is no longer needed to explain Moral Law. (This is not to say that god is hereby excluded, just that the existence of such presumed Law is a thin reed upon which to lean religious faith, given that other, biologically verified interpretations exist.)

As to that longing for god, Francis Collins asks "Why would such a universal and uniquely human hunger exist, if it were not connected to some opportunity for fulfillment? … Why do we have a 'God-shaped vacuum' in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled?" As his spiritual mentor, C. S. Lewis, pointed out "A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water." Many people would love to live forever. Does this mean that there is immortality? (I guess so: if they believe in the right religion.) Indeed, why would Janis Joplin have sung, "Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?" unless a Mercedes Benz exists? Evidently the existence of a Mercedes-shaped hole in Ms. Joplin's heart means that it was meant to be filled.

Collins is more persuasive, although certainly not original, when trotting out the Anthropic Principle, the argument that the universe is uniquely pre-tuned to bring about life in general and human life in particular. There are a number of physical constants and laws such that if any had been even slightly different, life might well have been impossible. For example, for roughly every billion quarks and antiquarks, there is an excess of one quark – otherwise, no matter. If the rate of expansion immediately after the Big Bang had been a teeny tiny fraction smaller than it was, the universe would have recollapsed long ago. If the strong nuclear forces holding atomic nuclei together had been just a smidgeon weaker, then only hydrogen would exist; if a hair stronger, all hydrogen would promptly have become helium, and the solar furnaces inside stars –which we can thank for the heavier elements – would never have existed.

Both Dawkins and Sagan also examine this argument, which Dawkins caricatures as "god-as-dial-twiddler." It is oddly tautological, in that if the universe were not as it is, we indeed would not be here to wonder about it. In Fred Hoyle's science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, it is explained that the probability of a golf ball landing on any particular spot is exceedingly low – and yet, it has to land somewhere! The Anthropic Principle can also be "solved" by multiple universes, of which ours could simply be the one in which we exist; this might apply not only to horizontally existing multi-verses, but to the same one occurring differently in time if there have been (and will be) unending expansions and contractions. Moreover, it isn't at all clear that the various physical dials are independent, or that the physical constants in the universe could be any different, given the nature of matter and energy. And isn't it more than a little arrogant to maintain that the gazillions of galaxies, with their mega-gazillions of stars, were expressly created by god so that he could bring forth Homo sapiens on the third planet from our particular sun, just so that we might "seek fellowship" with him?

The Language of God reveals Collins to be a decent, kind, generous and humane individual (ditto, by the way, for the writings of the Four Horsemen). Unlike the latter, however, Collins desperately hopes for a reconciliation – or at least, a lessening of animosity – between believers and non, and one hopes he might serve as an ambassador from science to evangelical Christianity, immunizing the latter against fear of the former. He would also like to missionize in the other direction. Recall the rabbi, visited by two members of his congregation who hold mutually contradictory positions, whereupon he reassures each that he is correct. The rabbi's wife reproves him, noting, "They can't both be right," whereupon the rabbi agrees, "You're right too!" Collins fervently maintains that both religion and science can be right.

Thus, he explicitly denies a strict interpretation of scripture – e.g., Adam and Eve, Noah's flood, Jonah inside the whale, etc. – eschewing literality when biblical accounts run obviously contrary to current science. At the same time, he believes fervently in other things, notably Jesus' resurrection, and the reality of a personal god who answers prayer. What, then, is his preferred basis for choosing to believe some Bible stories and not others? If Collins is simply clinging to those tenets that cannot be disproved, while disavowing those that can, then isn't he indulging in another incarnation of the "god of the gaps" that he very reasonably claims to oppose? What about, say, the Book of Revelations? Does the director of the Human Genome Project maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin and inseminated by the Holy Ghost? Was he haploid or diploid? Is it necessarily churlish to ask what it is, precisely, that a believer believes? In the devil, angels, eternal hellfire, damnation, archangels, incubi and succubi, walking on water, raising Lazarus?

Joan Roughgarden is more limited in her purview, specifically aiming at a reconciliation between Evolution and Christian Faith, rather than Collins' concern with Christian faith and science more generally. Advocates of "Theistic Evolution" (the claim that god chose to work via evolution, thereby eliminating any incompatibility) will doubtless applaud, while fundamentalist believers and materialist-minded unbelievers will not, although devotees of either will agree that Roughgarden is well-meaning, and adroit at summoning up New Testament parables in support of her nonconfrontationalist position.

Her bottom-line claim is that "the Bible is perfectly consistent with the two main facts of evolution – that all of life belongs to a common family tree and that species change over generations." But as to that "common family tree," what are we to make of the soul, which Roughgarden clearly believes is real, and uniquely possessed by human beings? How could "ensoulment" not bespeak a radical discontinuity, unless chimps, gorillas, orangs, etc., are granted souls (or semi-souls) as well? What about dogs? Crickets? Cantaloupes? Regarding "species change over generations," Genesis clearly asserts god's command that each living thing is to bring forth offspring "after his kind," which would certainly preclude changing into another kind.

Roughgarden ostensibly speaks from her scientific roots when she avers that "Jesus' teachings about generosity, kindness, love, and inclusion of all don't depend one whit on miracles." But on the next page, she recounts that "Even after his death, Jesus continued to downplay miracles. After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to a group of his disciples …" Wait a minute! If the resurrection of Jesus is not a miracle, what then is it? An article of faith, and thus exempt? A scientific fact?

Evolution and Christian Faith is a "plague-on-both-your houses" chastisement of "selfish genery" as well as of intolerant fundamentalism, and thus likely (along with Collins' book) to appeal to the "can't we all get along?" moderates among us: "We simply don't have to let ourselves get caught up in these polarizing positions," according to Roughgarden. "We can insist on a better tenor of discourse."

Edward O. Wilson – reigning dean of American organismal biologists – is also eager for reconciliation between science and religion, for the sake of policy, not polity. The Creation, written as an epistolary reaching-out to an unnamed southern Baptist preacher, is subtitled "an appeal to save life on earth." Wilson's journey was the inverse of Collins' – reared a pious Baptist in rural Alabama, he became a famous atheist scientist. Wilson's anguish, however, is not so much over the reduction in civility across the science-theology divide than about the reduction in planetary biodiversity, the imminence of large-scale, anthropogenic, species extinctions. Wilson's hope, powerfully expressed, is that doctrinal differences between religion and science could be put aside in favor of shared struggle defending the natural world: "Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share. … I suggest that we set aside our differences in order to save the Creation … Surely we can agree that each species, however inconspicuous and humble it may seem to us at this moment, is a masterpiece of biology, and well worth saving. … Prudence alone dictates that we act quickly to prevent the extinction of species and, with it, the pauperization of Earth's ecosystems – hence of the Creation."

In an oft-noted article published four decades ago in SCIENCE, historian Lynn White argued that the historical roots of our ecological crisis derive from the book of Genesis, which gave human beings their marching orders: to achieve dominion over nature. And to be sure, Judeo-Christian theologians have not generally distinguished themselves in support of nature (St. Francis and a few others excepted). Yet there is reason for hope, for the prospect of common cause on behalf of "the creation." The National Association of Evangelicals, for example, has become increasingly open to environmental defense, including concerns about global warming. This welcome development is based on precisely the switch from "dominion" to "stewardship" that Wilson advocates. Nor is it likely to be unique. I would bet that somewhere – even in that Heart of Darkness that constitutes the Bush Administration - there beats at least some sensitivity to preserving the Earth's natural treasures.

"However the tensions eventually play out between our opposing worldviews," Wilson observes to his imaginary pastor at the end of The Creation, "however science and religion wax and wane in the minds of men, there remains the earthborn, yet transcendental, obligation we are both morally bound to share."

Amen

Some good points in the mix, eh? When I have a bit more time, I may do a little analysis.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Church-state, Politics, Philosophy, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

What a Strange Universe We Inhabit

[Update: a co-alumnus of VT just alerted me to the fact that global E is not always conserved in GR; I need to quit over-simplifying things out of indolence and ignorance. He also opined both of the papers as crack science. He is probably right.]

First, head over to New Scientist and get a load of this: 70 great minds in science forecasting the next big thing in their area of expertise. [HT: Cosmic Variance]

Second, a caution: what follows are the musings of a scientist speaking outside of his area of expertise. You've been warned.

Third, apropos my title: in volume 12, issue 1 of New Astonomy, a very interesting article by Greg Bayer appears on pp. 47-51. The title of this article is, innocently enough, "Nonconservation of energy by the vacuum". It only addresses the question of whether or not black holes are capable of generating energy via gravitational repulsion, but it challenges the most basic assumption of science -- that energy and matter are conserved entities; something doesn't come from nothing. Most scientists who have been interviewed by world-science.net have dismissed it, but no one has yet weighed in with a definitive reason why the paper is flawed [aside from the obvious issue of breaking a fundamental assumption].

With­in black holes or si­m­i­lar ob­jects, he ar­gues, ex­treme con­di­tions may in­ject “in­sta­bil­i­ty” in­to the vac­u­um, con­vert­ing parts of it in­to non-vac­u­um, or mat­ter. “Mat­ter cre­a­tion can be said to arise from some new par­ti­cle in­ter­ac­tion which vi­o­lates en­er­gy con­ser­va­tion,” he wrote in an email.

Ein­stein de­ter­mined that an ob­jec­t’s grav­i­ty de­pends not just on its mass, as was known be­fore, but its pres­sure. If an ob­ject has enough neg­a­tive pres­sure, its grav­i­ty can al­so be­come neg­a­tive, and hence re­pul­sive rath­er than at­trac­tive.

Bay­er ar­gued that mat­ter cre­a­tion is as­so­ci­at­ed with re­pul­sive grav­i­ty be­cause it’s al­so linked to neg­a­tive pres­sure. “The flow of en­er­gy in­to the Uni­verse can be de­scribed as be­ing caused by an ex­ter­nal pres­sure from the vac­u­um,” he wrote in an email. “Viewed from in­side the Uni­verse, the pos­i­tive ex­ter­nal pres­sure looks like a neg­a­tive in­ter­nal pres­sure.” (link)

And, most importantly, to establish this as more than just armchair ramblings:

Bay­er said his the­o­ry of en­er­gy non-conservation could be tested us­ing par­ti­cle ac­cel­er­a­tors, which bash sub­a­tom­ic par­ti­cles to­ge­ther to help see what they’re made of. Nor­mal­ly, conserva­tion of en­er­gy is used to cal­cu­late prop­er­ties of the par­ti­cles fly­ing out of the bang-up. But the law is as­sumed, rath­er than prov­en, in these ex­per­i­ments, Bay­er ar­gued. “A se­ri­ous test of en­er­gy conserva­tion in high-en­er­gy col­li­sions will re­quire care­ful anal­y­sis of ma­ny com­plex multi-par­ti­cle events,” he wrote in his paper. This would be hard, he ad­ded, but it can be done. (link)

Following this issue, we find in v.12 i.2, pp.146-160, an article that may or may not tie in to this question. Abhas Mitra writes in the abstract,

Eddington was the first physicist to introduce special relativity into the problem and correctly insist that, actually, total energy stored in a star is not the mere Newtonian energy but the total mass energy (E = Mc²)...This concept has a fundamental importance though we know now that Sun in its present form cannot survive for more than 10 billion years. We extend this concept by introducing general relativity and show that the minimum value of depletion of total mass–energy is t_E = ∞ not only for Sun but for and sufficiently massive or dense object. We propose that this time scale be known in the name of “Einstein–Eddington”. We also point out that, recently, it has been shown that as massive stars undergo continued collapse to become a Black Hole, first they become extremely relativistic radiation pressure supported stars. And the life time of such relativistic radiation pressure supported compact stars is indeed dictated by this Einstein–Eddington time scale whose concept is formally developed here. Since this observed time scale of this radiation pressure supported quasistatic state turns out to be infinite, [t_E = ∞] such objects are called eternally collapsing objects (ECO). Further since ECOs are expected to have strong intrinsic magnetic field, they are also known as “Magnetospheric ECO” or MECO.

I will be interested to read the first detailed response to Bayer's article, and to see whether or not the second article ties into it, both in the blogosphere (at sites like Sean's) and in the journals. There has always been something about black holes that made scientists believe they may reveal key discoveries about the origins of our own universe. Sean thinks we'll know much more very soon (link).
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Technorati tags: Cosmology

Should Science Tell Us the Greatest Story Ever Told?

True or False:

...in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told...(link)

Well, you already know what I think -- tell the story that's true, ergo, not religious ones.

November 21, 2006
New York Times
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book The God Delusion is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

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It's a difficult thing, in my view, to say what the role of science is, insofar as "encouraging itself". Science is a method to knowledge, and it is also embodied in who scientists are, to some degree. Religion is not a method to knowledge, it's circumvention of justified knowledge via belief.

If people want justified knowledge, then encouragement is not necessary. Some people don't seem to want it at all, preferring their cherished hopes and dreams over the sometimes cold facts of the natural universe.

I don't know if the inherent nature of science is evangelical, or if it should be. Perhaps if we lived in a better world, the people whose ignorance and fear keeps them from accepting the reality of scientific knowledge and progress would not have to be "converted", because their fear and ignorance wouldn't exist in the first place.

But we don't live in the best of possible worlds, do we?

I am already an athevangelical, I suppose I can become a scientangelical as well ;-)
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Technorati tags: Science, Religion

Cry, Bang, then Laugh

You'll get the title in a second...

Check out Karen Armstrong's piece in the Guardian, "Bush's fondness for fundamentalism is courting disaster at home and abroad". It may contain a spurious quote.

I also wanted to share a resource that clears up the misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang in layman's terms and with adequate detail, via Angry Astronomer.

Finally, check out these two hilarious Youtube movies to start out your week:
1) Daily Show Report (in the "Constitution Schmonstitution" series): The Faith Based Faith of Stephen With a 'ph'
2) Kids in the Hall present: The Dr. Seuss Bible
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Technorati tags: Humor

Of Claws and Clauses: I

This was originally published 10/21/2005 on my old UF plaza website.

Of Claws and Clauses: I

All of us readers of Jurassic Park know a thing or two about nonlinear dynamics. The character Ian, played by Jeff Goldblum, describes Chaos theory, using the eloquent example of the “butterfly effect” to articulate its application: initial conditions that slightly change in nonlinear dynamical systems lead to an incredibly unpredictable, yet still nonrandom, outcome. Specifically, ‘a butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and you get rain instead of sunshine in Central Park.

The Big Bang is one such nonlinear system. Even knowing ALL the initial conditions would not allow one to accurately predict the outcome of the system, even though there are no “floating parameters” in the model, per se. I was recently reading on the ramifications of the Big Bang for theology in a various number of sources, and was unsurprised at the “spin” that each side applies: the theists use the unknown as proof of the unknowable (epitome of “God of the gaps”-type logic)−God’s intervention/creation, while the atheists use the unknown as an example of scientific horizon−yet undiscovered, but soon to be discovered (i.e. man is able to know everything, eventually).

At t = 0, spacetime itself does not yet exist, and all the matter and energy of the universe converge into a point of infinite density and temperature. This “unknown” is dubbed a singularity. This is a mathematical term, often used for nonlinear dynamical systems. Simply put, we conclude that the laws of physics as we know them today evolved out of this singularity, and so it is quite illogical to attempt to apply those same laws to the singularity itself. Even cause and effect is a Newtonian principle which quantum uncertainty and quantum fluctuations do not appear to obey now. Considering this, is it logical to apply causation to the Big Bang itself?

Some of the old-school cosmologists were so bothered by the presence of the singularity they attempted to present evidence for a “steady state” universe, one in which there was no t = 0, but rather an actual infinity. They failed. Some of the new-school cosmologists (Hawking, Turok, et al) have used other hypotheses (supergravity and string theory, respectively) to circumvent, or to at least explain in some logical way, the singularity itself.

I find myself falling somewhere in between those who attach a label of “hopeless” to such efforts and those who have full faith in human progress to the extreme that they feel everything will one day be known. I think of myself like Alan from Jurassic Park, who held on to a dinosaur claw until he felt it became irrelevant and ridiculous. I want to hold on to my skepticism that mankind will ever know with any degree of certainty the physical mechanisms that brought our current universe into being…and only cast it aside when I am sitting in the presence of this knowledge. Just as the velociraptor claw served as both a relic and evidence of a past we used to be 100% ignorant of, I am sure that my skepticism is a relic of the “Schoolmaster”/modernist clash, and the necessity to hold on to a reminder will not last forever.

I don’t think we will forever need to remind ourselves to reject pure faith (without reason), but for the time being, my nihilistic tendencies keep me clinging to a philosophy best described as original (authentic) Sophism, something that may now be best described in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, as I am highly skeptical, cynical and in some ways postmodern (mostly towards logical positivists, and towards general idealists) regarding the potential of human knowledge and discovery.

In physics, if you walk into a room and find a ball laying on an impressionable floor, you may be able to reconstruct where the ball was thrown from, and with what initial force (F = ma). However, if the ball is one of those blasted “Super Bouncy Balls”, and if the floor is concrete…good luck.

I am skeptical enough to still consider it rational to believe that our universe may indeed be a super bouncy ball that hit concrete (imperfect surface, of course, to maintain nonlinear dynamics) an unknowable amount of times before coming to rest.

For us to come along and find the ball and proclaim that our current laws of physics applied to the singularity is ridiculous (yet this is what “Kalam” arguments do−insisiting on “cause and effect” instead of giving way to quantum indeterminacy), and yet to proclaim that the quantum cosmologies hold a satisfying solution is…well…to me…aptly labeled “sophistry” in the colloquial sense of the word.

I like to think of myself as one of those guys who approaches the “elastic clause” of the Constitution with the same caution that I approach the “elastic laws” of the singularity, holding onto something tangiable for the time being, until evidence arises to convince me that my stance is outmoded, superceded, and unreasonable. Sort of writing a clause into my own scientific constitution, allowing myself the pleasure of maintaining skepticism and full rationality, with no hint of dichotomy.

[part 2]
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Technorati tags: God, Big Bang, Cosmology