Time Immortal

The Deeps of Time nails one out of the park:

What happens when you discover that that the universe is improbably fine-tuned for life? If the conclusion that God may have had something to do with it is too much to swallow, you propose a wild scenario without any empirical evidence which says, essentially, that we happened because everything “happens.” That’s science. Scientists don’t often like to admit that they, too, operate with philosophical and religious pre-assumptions, but Discover lets the cat out of the bag and reports on the anti-theistic motivation behind the multiverse theory…

This is in response to this article at Discover magazine, which notes:

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi­verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem” — the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

“For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility,” [Andrei Linde] says. “You might say, ‘Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence. Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.’ Well, I don’t know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations.”

What is of course immediately apparent is the rush to push God back out of the picture again, according to a false dichotomy that people on both sides of the religious/non-religious divide have built up. The assumption that faith in something beyond the merely empirical, especially faith expressed through a formal Religion, must be in conflict with science is a deeply-embedded prejudice for many people. But let us be clear: it is nothing more than a prejudice, and then a highly erroneous one.

To be fair, Linde could be correct: maybe there are an infinite number of universes, and ours is just the one that happened, by some fluke, to end up with all the necessary ducks in a row so that life could emerge in it.

But the article notes the key problem with the multiverse theory: there’s no way to prove it; it’s a faith claim, rather than a scientific conjecture. And its principle purpose is, as The Deeps of Time notes, anti-theistic in nature: it’s the only other suggestion, apart from the notion of some form of intelligent designer, that explains the exceedingly tight fine-tuning that is evident in the cosmos. And in a sense, it’s an extension of the tired argument that the likes of Richard Dawkins so often advance: that apparent design is just an illusion.

That argument will get you published, perhaps, but at some point it begins to wear thin. It might be useful when discussing e.g. how what we see with our eyes (the beauty of flowers and sunsets, the intricacy of the body and brain, etc.) seems to have an immense amount of thought put into its composition and operation. But when we’re talking about physical properties of the Universe, we’re not talking about things which we can perceive naturally (e.g. without the assistance of considerable amounts of technology and calculation). So even if we’ve evolved to think of a delicate flower as being something intricately designed, there’s no way we could have evolved to think of e.g. the fine structure constant as being similarly designed.

And yet, there is is, staring us in the face: the Universe we know is built upon a series of physical constants of exacting precision, and we would not exist had even one of these constants been even marginally more or less than it is.

Design is everywhere: we see it in the day-to-day operation of the world, in plants, animals, and our fellow human beings. And at the same time, design is there too in places we cannot see, in the very blueprints of creation itself.

Parsimony alone would suggest that at some point, what appears to be design should probably be considered to be design, especially when the very fabric of our existence seems to have been put in place with the emergence of life in mind. Suggesting otherwise — by, say, proposing a vast and unprovable myriad of barren alternate Universes — is as rational as suggesting that the world is merely 6,000 years old. Moreover, such a suggestion, though cloaked in the language and manner of science, is not a scientific suggestion at all. It is, as previously noted, a faith claim, and then a rather desperate one.

That is what this article appears to be suggesting — evidently, supermassive black holes that pull in large amounts of molecular cloud can form elliptical discs of gas remnants, which (perhaps due to the unique gravity conditions?) can subsequently give rise to star formation.

Even in destruction, then, creation takes place. Very cool.

Joel responded fairly quickly to my last post about him. He feels that I’ve missed the point. Interestingly, he doesn’t exactly do a great job of citing an example, preferring instead to approach it thusly:

He’s decided that I think all religions are the same.

Which is not what I said.

My point was that they are all equally crazy. Medicated or not, violent or not, oppressive or not. They are all people who hear voices from dogs. The difference in how far you must stretch believability between Scientology and Christianity is negligible.

(Actually, I think scientology is much more believable)*

I’m not sure how you can deny that.

Equally, O Reader, it could be argued that the statment above isn’t defensible either. It has not been conclusively established that belonging any Religion is a form of being “crazy.” That remains a matter of opinion (obviously not one which I, nor around 5 billion people world-wide — if not more — share).

As to the matter of stretching believeability, there’s still a gulf of difference between believing in Xenu and levels of mental proficiency, and believing in God and Jesus. With all due respect to L. Ron Hubbard, at least a few historical records (from different authors, even!) concerning Jesus’ life. Scientologist fiction might be interesting, to some, but it’s far harder to swallow and accept as factual than are the Gospels.

And the Gospels are better corroborated by external historical sources.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s refresh our memories with what Joel said about schizophrenia:

For example, lets suppose I’m schitzophrenic. And I believe that the dog is talking to me telepathically. Would you see any real difference between me and the other schitzophrenic that believes the dog is talking to him vocally?

Now, Joel is kind of trying to have his cake and eat it too; he asserts that I am incorrect in saying that he thinks all religions are the same. And yet, what is he saying above? From here, at least, his statement would seem to be saying that in his view, there isn’t any tangible difference between the two schizophrenics; they are “the same” for all intents and purposes. Except that they aren’t, as he later assures us.

Which is it?

And as much as Joel chides me for missing his point, he has missed mine:

He thinks that, since I don’t believe in god, then thats a religion as well since, of course, it has the word ‘god’ in it.

That is similar to saying I have a significant belief that there is not a gorilla in my closet.

Now, I am not currently looking in my closet, so I suppose there MIGHT be a gorilla in there.

But I have zero reason to believe there is.

Thats one of the tragic mistakes most theists make. They believe that there’s a decision to be made. Do you believe in god or not, in short.

In my experience, it tends to be atheists who adopt the “either/or” stance; most theists I know tend to first approach things from a “both/and” perspective (for example: the dialogue between science and Religion). Now, I admit that I’m the victim of a somewhat biased sample; most of my religious friends are Catholics. And I further admit that where belief in God is concerned, it’s hard to take a “both/and” stance — if one doesn’t believe in God, one can hardly be said to believe in God, can one?

Still, in my experience, it is atheists who tend to prefer dichotomy.

To be fair, I have talked about atheism — being just one more entrant on the spectrum of beliefs — from an angle that suggests decision-making. And I do think that there is a decision to be made. But it is not whether to believe, because belief is an unavoidable part of the human condition. We are all believers, even if we aren’t all members of religions according to the dictionary definition of the word.

The question is what we believe. We may not believe in God, and we may not believe in many gods. We may not believe that the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah contain the answers we are seeking after. But we may believe that science holds those answers. We may believe in reason. We may believe in rationalism. The point is: we all worship something, whether a transcendent divinity or our own wallet and/or genitals.

That is why truly, genuinely non-believing atheism (if it exists) can only, at most, be a temporary fad in the transition between Christianity and whatever belief system follows it down the way, whether that’s the same or another form of Christianity or some sort of paganism. Humanity can’t not believe; it’s in the very fabric of our being to worship. As I’ve noted, the only question is what we will worship. Will we worship what is true, or merely a simulacrum of the truth?

And here’s the rub: we all believe in things that “the evidence” cannot explain. Joel’s atheism is no grounded in empirical realities than is my Catholicism, and I do hope that Joel can appreciate that just because something is not “seen” does not mean that it is not real; it may mean that we lack the means to see it. The point, then, is that atheism is as much a “faith” — in the sense of being a philosophical conjecture and a belief in a metaphysical reality (or, perhaps more correctly, the lack thereof) that cannot be defended from evidence. It’s not necessarily accurate to call it a religion, but neither is it wholly inaccurate to do so.

Consider:

I don’t actively think there isn’t a gorilla in my closet. It would be INSANE to think that I had to make a choice about whether or not there’s a big old beastie in my closet. The default position is for me to not believe in such a thing in such a place. Assuming that my bedroom isn’t part of the gorilla migratory pattern.

No one would say that one of my characteristics is that I believe my closet to be gorilla-free.

This is technically true. Equally, though, the fact that there is no gorilla in Joel’s closet does not mean that there are no gorillas. And the presence or absence, in Joel’s closet, of something we have the capability to detect with one or more of our five senses says nothing at all about the presence or absence of something we lack the capability to detect in the same area.

Nor, would anyone say, as a another example, that a significant trait I hold is that I don’t believe squirrels talk, or that my mother walks through walls, or that men rise from the dead.

These are, I think we can agree, aberrations from the norm. Without evidence to say that these aberrations are occuring, the default position is that they aren’t happening. But given that this is the default, the significant aspect is choosing to believe in them.

The norm is to not.

Of course, you can’t have these conversations with many theists because they believe there is evidence of god. No one has shown me any.

There is one word, I think, that applies to Joel’s beliefs here: Positivism. I’ve written about that many, many times, and see no need to re-hash prior content here. Suffice to say that if Joel’s atheism is based primarily on a lack of empirical evidence for faith, his atheism is weak indeed, and possessed of a fundamental illogic.

And as I have noted above, the fact that we don’t have evidence for a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing in question does not exist; equally, we may lack the ability to perceive or otherwise detect the thing. Certainly that was true of atoms until recently, and most stellar phenomena as well. Over time, we have developed methods of seeing those things, but other things yet remain unobserved: gravitational waves, for example, or the Higgs boson. Or, for that matter, extraterrestrial life. Perhaps, in time, we will observe these things as well. Then again, perhaps we won’t ever observe them directly.

The existence of a thing is independent of whether we have seen it. If there are aliens on some planet way out there in the depths of space, we don’t know it. But if we (and they) die out before either of us ever has the chance to meet the other, that does not mean that we both did not exist, does it?

Yes, there isn’t any hard evidence for the existence of God or Jesus — not anymore, at least, since Jesus hasn’t taken an Earthly stroll in nearly two thousand years. But then, if there were evidence, it wouldn’t be “faith,” would it?

They only thing they ever do is show examples of things we can’t explain…yet.

But they don’t like that last word.

These closing sentences of his illustrate, yet again, why Joel’s refusal to distinguish between different religions and/or denominations thereof hampers his ability to argue effectively. Methinks that he is too used to debating Evangelicals — personally, I take no issue with the word “yet” (as in, say, “Christ has not returned…yet,” perhaps?). It is, after all, just a word to describe a possible future.

Joel also seems to assume, erroneously, that a dichotomy exists between the sciences and religion, and seems to assume that given sufficient time, science will enable us to completely do away with religion. Obviously, I don’t share that viewpoint; there is no inherent contradition between religion and science, and in fact both are pathways of revelation. And as science continues to discover new and exciting things, I do not find my faith weakend — if anything, it is strenghtened as I become better able to comprehend the magnificence of the works that God has wrought.

We cannot know everything about how God works in the Universe, but it does serve to note that there is nothing to say that God, having built the Universe in a certain way, cannot effect his plans for the Universe and those living in it via the natural processes that are at work within creation. There is nothing to say that God didn’t forge humanity out of successive generations of progressively more complex lifeforms. Nor is there anything that says that God, having devised gravity, could not have used gravity to fabricate the stars and planets that now pepper the cosmos.

Atheists seem to expect that everything about God necessarily has to involve whiz-bangs and lightshows. It isn’t necessarily always so.