Over in LiveJournal land, Sherwood Smith links approvingly to an essay by Tom Simon in response to what are apparently some "logical positivist" evles in Christopher Paolini's books. I haven't read the books in question, but it really doesn't matter, as Simon very quickly spins this off into a larger essay about the nature of the world, in the mode of C.S. Lewis:
In my life, I have never witnessed an instance where the laws that govern the world sufficed to explain an event. That is, I have never seen anything that was not, strictly speaking, the after-effect of a miracle. Many events have been within my ability to explain, but I am convinced that I succeeded, not because I am not woefully ignorant about the universe, but because a deity set up the workings of nature in such a way that analysis is possible even from grossly imperfect information.
For in strict truth, as Lewis points out, the laws of nature do not explain any event that actually happens. For instance, the laws of physics state that it is possible to have a particle with a unit negative charge, and a spin of one-half, and such and such a mass, and various other properties, which we call an electron. They further state that if you have an electron, it will behave in various (more or less) predictable ways. It will, for instance, repel other electrons and not attract them; it will orbit an atomic nucleus, if available, in one of a fixed set of possible energy states, but not in any intermediate state; and so on. But the laws do not state that there has to be an electron. You have to supply that for yourself; or have it supplied for you, which is what most of us do.
From there, he goes on in a direction you could probably guess from the mention of C. S. Lewis:
It can be objected that given the laws of physics as they are, electrons must appear under certain conditions. But this is only to beg the question. How did the conditions arise? For that matter, why should the laws of physics be that way? Some physicists make a jolly game out of investigating the properties of Flatland, a two-dimensional space that exists (so far as we know) only in their imaginations. It turns out that in Flatland there is no such force as magnetism, and a lot of the other laws of nature as we know it must be drastically altered. So would they be in a four-dimensional space; and four or two are not more arbitrary numbers than three. We happen to live in a three-dimensional universe, but we don't know why. (Even Lisi's head-splitting 'Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything' doesn't manage to explain that.) For that matter, anybody who follows fractal theory knows that there is no necessary reason why the number of dimensions in space even has to be an integer.
The universe we live in is a strange and improbable place -- perhaps infinitely strange. It is no more necessary that there should be a place where electrons can exist, than that I should have a bank account containing a million dollars. Only one of these things happens to be true. It would be a strange and unaccountable thing, a miracle of economics, if I woke up tomorrow to find that I had a million dollars in the bank. I could only conclude that someone unknown to me put them there. And it is a strange and unaccountable thing that Someone, or Something, produced a three-dimensional space with an additional dimension of time, and filled it with the energy, and subjected it to the laws, that together produced the universe we know. If I did not know better, I should call that Someone or Something God. And in fact I don't know better, and so I do call Him by that name.
I'm a little hesitant to write about this here, because I'm a lot more tolerant of religious language than most of the ScienceBlogs family, and this kind of gets up my nose. There's a kind of smugness to this that I find really irksome. But again, you could've gotten that from the C.S. Lewis name-drop.
On a less emotional level, I think this argument suffers from the same basic flaw as the Paul Davies piece from a week or two ago. Davies attempted to put science and religion on equal footing, by saying that science requires faith that the world will behave in an orderly and rational manner. Which works, but only through doing some violence to the conventional definition of "faith"-- it's true that the logical and orderly nature of the universe is an assumption without proof, but it's an assumption that you have to make to do anything. The alternative to a belief that the universe is orderly and rational is total paralysis-- if you discard that, not only would you not be able to do science, you wouldn't be able to go to the store.
Simon is doing the same thing with the word "miracle." It's true that there's no particular reason why the universe has to exist, but if you define existence itself as a "miracle," then you've sort of lost contact with the rest of the English-speaking world, who use the word in a very different way. As with Davies's claim, it's an unbeatable argument-- how can you lose, when you get to define words to mean what you need them to mean?-- but not one that goes anywhere useful.
I would be perfectly fine with the whole "isn't existence marvelous?" thing, though, if that's where it ended. The universe is an amazing place, and it's occasionally good to take a moment to contemplate just how cool it is (not too often, otherwise you'd never get anything done, but every now and again). What bugs me, though, is the attempt to leverage this into an argument for the existence of God, and a fairly particular God at that.
Awe at the wonders of the universe is all well and good, but it's not proof of anything. Tacking God on at the end of this just makes it a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which has been failing to be entirely convincing since the days of Aristotle. So Simon has a version that mentions electrons and Garrett Lisi. That and a dollar will get you $1.02 Canadian.
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Excellent and straight forward response Chad.
Yeah, I think you pretty much nailed it - this is more or less exactly Davies' argument. I like Scott Aaronson and Fred Ross's responses the most out of the ones I've seen.
Note to those tempted to argue from mystery to religion: you are arguing from mystery! Show a little respect for it!
"That and a dollar will get you $1.02 Canadian."
Really? the Canadian dollar isn't worth more than the US Dollar yet??? (actually, according to google they're equal)...
Really? the Canadian dollar isn't worth more than the US Dollar yet??? (actually, according to google they're equal)...
It was significantly more than the US$ a month or so ago, but they've come back to roughly equal. Google had $1CDN=$0.98US this morning when I was typing that.
The real game of science though is logic, all of science must submit to logic, so if it is logical for a higher power outside of the universe to exist, it just is.
Take the question: Does existence exist? and was there ever a time when existence never existed? How does a scientist answer those?
If he says no to either of them, the whole of science collapses. Either way, the universe is made of logic, whence comes logic? who knows. I just accept that "existence exists, in some form always".
I was having a discussion with about quantum mechanics and realized finally that geometry and logic are unified, whether or not that's provable is anyones guess but it necessarily follows from distinctions between objects.
The question for the naturalist is: Why are there boundaries between objects if nature is self-sufficient, why is there *distinction*?
I think *that* is the most important question in science, because it forces science to deal with the fact that science is a subset of human minds, not above it.
And that man and the universe are at one, they are not separate things, the separation is an illusion of the senses as Einstein so wonderfully said concerning relativity.
Well actually we don't have to resort to a "faith" based position on the issue of an orderly universe. The scientific method provides the out here quite nicely. We simply observe that the universe is orderly, submit evidence we have verifying this, suggest evidence and experiments that might refute it, and then sit back and wait to see if any evidence of a disorderly universe appears. I think we have sufficient evidence to accept the theory that this is an orderly universe without to much fuss. And if any evidence shows up to the contrary we can certainly examine it and revise the theory.
No faith required.
"No faith required."
Wrong, the root of the word faith is trust, you're confusing definitions. Religiousness, one form of trust.
So when you say you have no faith in science, you say you have no trust in it. Obviously not many scientists are in the science of linguistics.
So his argument stands as far as language is concerned.
Ironically, this is why I bill myself as an agnostic rather than an atheist. There is a good philosophical question in there-- why are the laws of the universe the way they are? What caused them to be that way?
When most of us were around the age of 13 or 15 or 17, I think we all realized that good answers to medieval questions still left a "why?" hanging in the background, and good answers to pre-quantum and pre-relativity questions still left a "why?" hanging in the background, and that good answers to modern questions will probably do the same, in infinite regress.
"God," is certainly one way out of that trap. But even if I accepted that answer, I could not myelf fail to ask, "Why God?" It makes exactly as much sense to me that some God exists without a cause, as that the whole universe exists without a cause. There is nothing-- absolutely nothing-- to help me decide which is more plausible or likely. Frankly, both answers seem absurd, but I'm not seeing too many other solutions.
The thing about Simon is, he obviously has an easier time swallowing "God exists without creation," than "the Universe exists without creation," and then comes to a full, unreflective philosophical stop.
I find both the hard science position and the hard religious position too strong. The analogy I remember from when I was emphatically an agnostic was (no citation, sorry) of science having painted God into a corner of a room, with all expectation being that the floor would soon be all done. Hence, rhetorically, God was doomed. Eventually, I decided that science might just as easily have painted only a very small dot in an infinite room. I can't see how we can be sure which analogy is closer to how the world is and how God is. These simple-minded analogies don't lead to a proof that God exists, nor that God has particular attributes, but neither do they justify more than an anthropic acceptance that the universe apparently is ordered enough for us to exist, and ordered enough that collecting and ordering our knowledge is perhaps useful.
The standard models of particle physics and of cosmology that we have now might be as ordered as our understanding of the world gets, or even if we manage to construct progressively more detailed and more useful theories over millenia, still there may be no ultimate mathematical theory that explains everything. In the absence of something else that seems more useful to do, we can and perhaps should keep collecting and ordering, but only our future successes, not our past successes, justify keeping blindly on.
I think science has caused some of the blowback against rationality by making excessive claims for the extent of our knowledge. In particular, the harm that has been done by incomplete knowledge, particularly unexpected environmental damage, has encouraged those outside science to much greater caution about the claims of science. There has been a society wide loss of faith in science as a benefactor, with the wide-eyed adverts for technology of the 1950s being inconceivable today, which has left a void that the human imagination has not found a new replacement for, returning instead to the religious benefactors of old.
Personally, I think we should strive for beauty and wisdom, whatever they are, not so much for knowledge of the truth, whatever that is, but what do I know?
"Well actually we don't have to resort to a "faith" based position on the issue of an orderly universe. The scientific method provides the out here quite nicely."
Actually it doesn't, the root word of faith is trust, science doesn't "provide a way out" sorry.
I think many modern philosophers would disagree with you on this point. I am not a philosopher myself, but I have read a lot of Nietzsche. Nietzsche posits that such things as causality, number, and natural law are the result of interpretation and perspective; they are concepts which scientists project onto reality. Nietzsche takes particular issue with the idea of the atom, or really the existence of identical copies of anything (see "On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense" or "Human, All Too Human"). He finds a will to absolute truth in these things: a will to dogma. Consequently, Nietzsche finds scientists to be just as guilty as priests to be searching for a will to nihilism.
Nietzsche rejects an orderly and rational world and replaces it with a continual re-evaluation of the self and the "process of becoming". It is a world where nothing is static, but everything is constantly evolving into something new.
Then again, Nietzsche went completely crazy, so maybe we won't make it to the store if we throw out a rational and ordered world. My only point is that your statement might not be as obvious as you think from a philosophical perspective.
Time changes truth, niche is correct, imagine we froze time, then we moved it forward one frame, all the positions of objects would change, truth, and therefore science, is just a description of a change over a frame or series of frames of time, and since time changes, science can never be "totally true", and niche was correct.
Blake:
You know, I have a certain admiration for some of Nietzche's lines of thought, but that's really not one of them. Besides, he's really not the poster boy for maintaining functionality in the face of an irrational universe. As you say, he eventually went mad.
Even so, while there are philosophers who agree with your bottom line, they probably pay their taxes every year, having great faith in the order and rationality of the IRS. In other words, the philosophy doesn't mean much if one doesn't live it.
Wrong_definition @ 7:
"No faith required."
Wrong, the root of the word faith is trust, you're confusing definitions. Religiousness, one form of trust.
The fact that the English word "faith" has its origins in a Latin word with a particular meaning is interesting, but irrelevant. The modern English words "faith" and "trust" have different meanings, and pretending they don't via appeals to etymology doesn't change that.
This is just the usual bullshit: "We don't understand X. Therefore God did X."
Wrong_definition:
You are correct in that 'trust' is a particular definition of 'faith' but I think it would be a leap to claim the two are equivalent to most people today.