Universal Arguments...again

By Gary Berg-Cross

 

The Washington Post had a book review by MIT physicist  & novelist Alan Lightman (latest book is “The Accidental Universe.”) on Amir D. Aczel‘s book  “Why Science Does Not Disprove God.”  You can get a sense of the differences between these 2 thinkers from their book titles and Lightman takes Aczel to task on several topics.

One of the first is the claims about Albert Einstein's religious views. It’s been extensively discussed and Aczel selectively repeats several on Einstein early pronouncements that gesture towards a Deity using religious vocabulary:

 

“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not” and

“I want to know God’s thoughts — the rest are details.”

I put more store in the case that Einstein channeled Spinoza pantheistic notions that identifies the god idea with nature and not a personal god seen in Jewish scripture.

 

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems."

From  Hoffmann, Banesh (1972). Albert Einstein Creator and Rebel. New York: New American 

Library, p. 95  cited in Wikipedia on E’s religious views see also Jammer’s, Einstein and Religion (Princeton 1999) and more recently Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster 2007).

You can see this humble rather than doctrinaire stance in later pronouncements by E preferring agnostic sounding formulations (sometimes alluding to mysteries) as he said:   

"an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

It is always interesting to see defenders of the creator hypothesis present E’s idea without his penumbra of humbleness on the whole issue.  Having harnessed a dogmatic style Einstein Aczel, as reported by Lightman, sets out to “debunk the arguments of the New Atheists but also to gently suggest that the findings of science actually point to the existence of God.” And so we pass some arguments about weaknesses of evolutionary explanations but arrive at the more contentious point of argued in L. Krauss’s bestseller “A Universe From Nothing.” Aczel is willing to follow this physical argument about quantum foam effect fluxuations producing something from nothing physical, but can ask where the quantum laws come from.

 

Lawrence Krauss has misused the idea of “empty space” to argue that the universe itself came out of sheer “emptiness.” But we know that the space in which pairs of particles can form is never empty, it is not a “nothing”—it always contains energy, and it always becomes permeated by lines of force representing fields (electromagnetic, gravitational, and other); and it is the energy supplied by these fields that leads to the creation of pairs of particles. The creation of such particles is therefore never “out of nothing”—it is out of a preexisting space that is filled with energy. That space, that energy, and the fields that permeate it all have to come from somewhere. But there are many problems even here that have not been addressed by this theory. [ p. 127]

 

The Krauss point however, going back to Einstein and pantheism, is to see natural explanations such as pre-existing nature as preferred to theo-religious ones – existence depending on a god. Such natural explanations seem not only more likely and celebrate the wonder of our natural universe. They have, if you

wish, a degree of faith in what provides the best explanation. But the detailed, empirical one seems the more logical to put growing faith in. Every day we hear of something that adds to our understanding of the history of a 13.7/13.8 billion year universe. Less frequently we confirm bigger insights such as a basis for gravity with the Higgs boson, detection of gravity waves or support for Alan Guth’s 1980 inflationary theory of the early universe period of exponential growth, what was labeled earlier the Big Bang.

The long-sought observations, taken from Antarctica, strongly support the cosmological theory of "inflation," which explains how the early universe smoothly expanded to unimaginable vastness in the first fractional second of its existence.’

 There seems no comparable advance on the theological side to things as foundational and explanatory as the cosmic background radiation.

 

See also Forbes article on the Sci-Phil arguments that arise from an Aczel style book.

Why is there something instead of nothing? Part 1

One of the reasons many people shy away from atheism is the conviction that a creator God is a reasonable explanation, and the only viable explanation, for how the universe came to exist. The commonly held assumption is that nothingness was the initial condition sometime prior to the Big Bang and that nothingness is a condition from which something cannot appear. This perspective underpins deism, although many agnostics and theists also share this perspective and see this need for something to originate from nothing as being the Achilles Heel of atheism. The new book, "A universe from nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing", by Lawrence M. Krauss, disputes this assumption. I will discuss that book in a future blog post. For now, let's take a quick look at another cosmologist's overlapping commentary on this topic.

Sean Carrol of the California Institute of Technology, in his article "Does the Universe Need God?", says this: "Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self- contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement." Furthermore, citing Hawking, he notes that "nothing in the fact that there is a first moment of time ... necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment." Indeed, "the issue of whether or not there actually is a beginning to time remains open." Instead, the Big Bang may be a "transitional stage in an eternal universe." He also explains that "the multi-verse is not a theory, it is a prediction of a theory", based on combining string theory with inflation. Furthermore, contrary to what theistic critics sometimes assert, a multi-verse complies with the preference for simple explanations because "the simplicity of a theory is a statement about how compactly we can describe the formal structure ..., not how many elements it contains."

Sean Carrol points out that a compelling argument for God "would consist of a demonstration that God provides a better explanation (for whatever reason) than a purely materialistic picture, not an a priori insistence that a purely materialistic picture is unsatisfying." Furthermore, "to refer to this or that event as having some particular cause .... Is just shorthand for what's really going on, namely: things are obeying the laws of physics." Accordingly, "there is no reason ... to think of the existence and persistence and regularity of the universe as things that require external explanation." Furthermore, with theism "we're not simply adding a new element to an existing ontology (like a new field or particle), or even replacing one ontology with a more effective one at a similar level of complexity .... We're adding an entirely new metaphysical category, whose relation to the observable world is unclear." Sean Carrol then notes the discrepancies between the universe we should expect if traditional theisms were true and the universe as it is. God "isn't needed to keep things moving, or to develop the complexity of living creatures, or to account for the existence of the universe." At 14 pages, his article is worth the time investment required to read.

Understanding Complex Issues: Lessons from the Life of a Pebble

By Gary Berg-Cross

Recent posts have addressed some complex issues including free will (and fine tuning) as well as the psychology of religion. Often complicated issues are dumbed down to make them more acceptable and digestible to a broad swath of folks. But this is often done disingenuously using fallacious arguments and/or false data to lead people to targeted conclusions and opinions. See for example, Mathew Goldstein’s blog Theists' defense against atheism and human invention fails.

Presidential campaigns, like chit-chat, often tend to avoid difficult issues. Appealing to preconceptions, using simplifying language and binary thinking frames are all part of a dumbing down to fit the narrative styles of contemporary life. Complex social and natural phenomena like climate change just aren’t sexy items and get discussed in bumper sticker phrases. This telegraphic style comes despite that fact that most of us would acknowledge that there nuances and shades of gray on issues. We just don’t routinely take them into account.

It is plausible that complexity emerges from multi-causal factors and the fact that many issues are composite being made up of several parts. Further such parts are often in conflict. National security, for example, is composed of many factors supposedly organized in defense of our concept of freedom.

But national security polices can be in conflict with some established ideas of freedom and liberty. And what about a seemly distant concept like climate change? As some have noted the world-wide costs and consequences of changing climate (increases in global average air/ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow & ice and rising global average sea level) is one strong factor influencing how the 21st century will unfold. The totality of such effects they will have serious implications for U.S. national security interests, as well as global stability. Defense analysts talk about a range of problems from the mundane of coastal military installations more sustainable to the supporting the stability of “friendly” nations that lack the suite of resources, good governance, & resiliency needed to respond to the many adverse consequences of climate change. The subtleties and depth of understanding needed for such things tens to get thrown aside in political campaigns as they put issues into neatly categorized little boxes often for ideological ideas. Such is the case with things like climate change denial which often seems based on a mis-uderstanding of the underlying science. It's just too hard to unscramble the egg of deep time and understand our current circumstances in earth historical time.

But science is quite different and complex phenomena, such as evolution, get their due. It’s a contrasting pleasure to read an exposition of complex issues by a scientist to a talking point snipptet of a gabby politician like Newt Gingrich. It was therefore a great joy to run across a guided trip through geological complexity in a book The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth's Deep History by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz. There is an online copy of much of it including pictures!

If you or I pick up a rock at the beach we might see some small beauty and a portion of the composite nature. But Zalasiewicz know how to pick a special rock whose existence is entwined with the history of the whole Earth. He picks a pebble “of gray slate from a Welsh beach - perhaps from somewhere like Aberystwyth, or Clarach, or Borth on the west Wales coast." But Zalasiewicz knows about the inherent complexity in the pebble which he compares to a dense computer chip –“ tightly packed with more information than one could ever surmise from gazing on its smooth surface." It’s the unpack of this information with modern techniques that makes such an interesting story.

It does take Jan a while to elucidate the complexity in 13 chapters, each exploring a different stage in the history of the material from which the pebble is made and ways we have of dating these events and what happened in them. Along the way we learn geologist’s lingo and come to love ‘strata” and such.

He starts all the way back with a cosmological view Big Bang expansion at a time before there were elements for a pebble is be composed of. This is followed by plenty of violence periods including exploding stars to product the elements from which the slate-based pebble emerged. Then there is the formation of the sun and the planets followed by the formation of continents and seas.

Today, almost everything that happened to the pebble and its constituent parts can be inferred from lab measurement. One of the most interesting is zircon, a high-density accessory mineral that often turns up in trace quantities in rocks such as granites and quartzes. Zircon crystals aren’t pretty to a layman or a jeweler, but they were born 4.4 billion years ago - only a hundred million years or so after the Earth was formed, and are our oldest terrestrial material. Besides they are geologically adventuresome and have unique chemical properties that allow geologists to reconstruct their birth in ancient landscapes. Zircons act as eerily accurate atomic clocks with small amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium that they contain decaying constantly to provide a radiometric clock that can tell us when as well as where they first appeared. This gives earth scientists access to what Zalasiewicz calls a virtual “time machine” to Earth’s beginnings” nearly four and half billion years ago. Zalasiewicz’s isotopic tales of ancient continents and explanations of how geologists have learned to unravel such complex geochemical matrices are just as gripping as his detailed accounts of the pebble’s eventful history. For example, Neodymium isotopes tell when the stuff that makes up the pebble was released from the Earth's mantle.

Among the intertwined topics showing the complex processes that lead to a small pebble we follow the formation of ancient continents. Runoff from these provides the sediment that made the pebble’s slate was derived. When this sediment was deposited in ancient oceans it included hydrocarbons formed from buried organic matter. Biology is a surprisingly powerful part of the story. It turns out that Jan’s pebble contains fossils of graptolites, animals that date the rock with fine precision. There is even lichenometry, a method by which the stubbornly slow,steady growth of lichen gives us clues about how long its rock-host has had a surface for its growth. Such events leave traces that can now be dated from isotopic methods. This allows Zalasiewicz to tell not only us a story of various aged components of the pebble but also how we know this. This is not a story on faith, but one of scientific method and the resulting understanding. Unlike religious mysteries these are painstakingly uncovered. And each part encodes and reveals a different part of commensurate fabric. Truly a wonderful experience and a lesson in knowing.

Note, the title is a bit of a take on William Blake rhapsody about the possibility of seeing “ a world in a grain of sand." Where Blake was poetic and a bit mystical in Auguries of Innocence Zalasiewicz is being more like the Newton that Blake feared and seeing the beauty of a rainbow that is not decreased by natural understanding, but is heightened. I wish that more of our thought leaders would take on such a project and educate the public in the honest possibilities After John McPhee’s works it is one of the most accessible works on geology that can be enjoyed by a layman.