I. Mysticism
Years ago, as a bright-eyed young
physics major, I took what I thought was a hard-nosed skeptical
attitude to the question of God. When the topic came up I would
dismissively repeat the same mantra that I’d heard every other
hard-nosed skeptic say: “There doesn’t seem to be any good
evidence.” It’s a mantra that makes you feel strong. It makes you
feel safe. It’s great protection against the threat of
silly-sounding beliefs, like UFOs, angels, or the Loch Ness monster.
I called myself an Atheist. I saw it as
a rational, honest, and manly way to be. A scientific way to be.
This changed entirely after my senior
year of college. I had an experience that shook me to my core.
During the course of this breakdown I had several mystical
experiences. I felt the presence of God. It broke my arrogance and my
ego. What I saw helped me rebuild my life. And since then I have
always called myself a Theist.
Mystical experiences, by nature, are
generally impossible to explain in detail. I admit that the mystical
experiences of a single person do not constitute scientific evidence.
Many try to explain mysticism as a kind of purely psychological
phenomenon, something pathological or filling some “psychological
need” that has no bearing on reality. In other words, you might say
I went crazy and was simply delusional.
However, even the most atheistic
scientists, after studying mysticism in depth, will admit that these
states of mind serve an important function. The psychologist William
James, for example, wrote:
Whether my
treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do
not know, for my constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment
almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand. But ...
I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of
the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their
function. (Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI)
It’s interesting that despite never
reading William James (or much at all about mysticism) before my
experiences happened, they had all the qualities that William James
described as peculiarly mystical:
1.
Ineffability.--The handiest of
the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is
negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies
expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in
words. ...
2. Noetic
[intellectual] quality.--Although
similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who
experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of
insight into depths of truth unplumbed ...
3.
Transiency.--Mystical states
cannot be sustained for long. ...
4.
Passivity.--...[W]hen the
characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic
feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if
he were grasped and held by a superior power. (Varieties of
Religious Experience, Lecture
XVI)
The similarities
between such experiences are so deep, that you could take the
following description quoted by William James in Lecture III, replace
“hilltop” with “beach,” and it would all apply, word for
word, to my own experience near its height:
“I
remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my
soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a
rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was
deep calling unto deep—the deep that my own struggle had opened up
within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching
beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me, and all the
beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did
not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The
ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment nothing but
an ineffable joy and exultation remained. It is impossible to fully
describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great
orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling
harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that is
soul is being wafted upwards, and almost bursting with its own
emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more
solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more
felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that
He was there than that
I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the
two.”
All of
this was true for me too, though it barely scratches the surface of
either his experience or mine. Many, probably most of the details of
our experiences were different. I could write an entire book about
everything I realized in that moment, everything that came together
about the nature of joy and suffering, civilization and humanity,
truth and beauty, good and evil. Sometimes it seems to me that
everything I have contemplated since then had its seed in the
knowledge I gained in that moment, that in fact I could fill many
books with what I realized, that
this is what I have been trying to do ever since: to explain what I
saw. But in reality no number of books could contain everything I
saw, because it was the infinity of God.
Even
his description of the effects
of his experience are identical to mine:
“My
highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me. I
have stood upon the Mount of Vision since, and felt the Eternal round
about me. But never since has there come quite the same stirring of
the heart. Then, if ever, I believe, I stood face to face with God,
and was born anew of his spirit. There was, as I recall, no sudden
change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude
conception, had, as it were, burst into flower. There was no
destruction of the old, but a rapid, wonderful unfolding. Since that
time no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God’s
existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the
presence of God’s spirit, I have never lost it again for long. My
most assuring evidence of his existence is rooted in that hour of
vision, in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the
conviction, gained from reading and reflection, that something the
same has come to all who have found God. I am aware that it may
justly be called mystical. I am not enough acquainted with philosophy
to defend it from that or any other charge. I feel that in writing of
it I have overlaid it with words rather than put it clearly to your
thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as carefully as I
now am able to do.”
This writer says he
believed in God both before and after the experience. This might seem
to be different from my case, since I claimed to be an atheist
before. But in reality it is not different. I was not actually
an atheist before. In fact, once you understand what a true believer
means by the term “God,” it’s impossible to call yourself an
atheist. What I claimed to disbelieve in is something no one can
really believe in: an old man who lives in the clouds hurling
lightning bolts and judging souls based on silly, technical rules.
In fact, in order
to explain my experience to those who have this narrow idea of God in
their minds, I will often say that I saw “Eternity” because this
is equally true and helps some people understand better.
William James and
other psychologists have often stressed the fact that mystical
experiences will be shaped by the culture you were raised in. Hindus
have experiences confirming Hinduism, Muslims will have experiences
confirming the Qur’an, and Christians will have experiences
confirming Christ.
I don’t deny
this. My upbringing was partially Christian, though my parents left
organized religion before I was a teenager. And what I believed about
the universe by my senior year of college was heavily influenced by
science. I did (and still do) believe that Darwin’s theory of
evolution is largely correct. I did (and still do) believe that Big
Bang cosmology is largely correct. More than this, I had read a great
deal of Omega Point theory, the Anthropic Principle, and Platonic
philosophy, and much of what I realized during my brush with Eternity
had to do with how all these things (Christianity, evolution,
cosmology, and philosophy) are deeply connected in surprising and
powerful ways.
I have written
about several of these topics over the last fourteen years, but not
all. The core of my spiritual belief has been kept private now for
over a decade. Why? Because it has always seemed too hard to express.
Over the years I’ve started many blog posts and even books on the
subject of fundamental metaphysics, but I have not yet finished any.
The problem is ... well I don’t know what the problem is. Maybe
it’s all too personal. Maybe as the discussion becomes technical I
feel I am missing the point. Maybe too often I find my arrogance gets
in the way, my overwhelming desire to turn over all objections and
finally prove this metaphysics the one true metaphysics. Maybe too
often I’ve tried to avoid theology because I feel that no one would
listen but those who are already convinced. But theology is
unavoidable in metaphysics. In fact the two are identical in essence.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics claims to be about what is “most
divine,” speaks of the universe’s “Final Cause” (what modern
physicists call the Omega Point) and has been cited by theologians
for centuries.
So how did I come
to finally post on all this now? What happened? What did I
realize? That I don’t know, not exactly. I recently got in a
discussion online about cosmological fine-tuning with an atheist. I
promised I would start a Reddit thread on fine-tuning because we both
wanted to go more in depth. So I started doing research and I
realized that to give the cosmological fine-tuning argument for God
its fair due, I would need to defend the Christian view. I would need
to start doing some more serious apologetics. Because the truth is,
logical arguments for the existence of God are never enough. And the
reason for this is the reason for mysticism, is what we’ve been
discussing—His ineffability.
II.
Fine-tuning
In most
discussions of fine-tuning you’ll start by talking about Einstein’s
General Relativity and how black holes would have swallowed
everything if the universe had been just slightly more lumpy. Or
you’ll start with quantum mechanics and explain why if certain laws
were off by 1% all your protons will decay before atoms, molecules,
stars, or any form of life would have a chance to evolve. All of this
is very interesting, and we’ll get to it, but it’s all completely
meaningless unless we can agree on a context of what exactly
it’s all fine-tuned for. If you get your car a tune-up it’s
because you want it to drive. (And shouldn’t a fine
tune-up make it drive fine?) If you tune your instruments, you
want them on key. (And wouldn’t a fine tune do more
than this?)
Generally
speaking, to tune something is to calibrate it for a purpose. For an
end goal. It’s interesting that a number of physicists (e.g. Luke Barnes, Martin Rees) defend fine-tuning as true but won’t touch the question
of God. But the two notions are connected. If something’s tuned
you’ve got a tuner.
Ah, but
here’s a tricky point. How can you know anything about this
supposed tuner of the universe when he’s outside of space and time?
How do you know what his purpose is? Well, you can’t. And so
it would seem that (at least scientifically) this whole line of
thought is a non-starter. This is exactly what philosophers tend to
argue (cf. Stanford's Elliott Sober in "The Design Argument," which is Chapter 6 of the Blackwell Guide To The Philosophy Of Religion).
But it
seems to me that people aren’t being quite fair. When Elon Musk
tried to prove that we’re all in a giant computer program, sure,
there was a quite a bit of scoffing, but it wouldn’t have been
nearly as much scoffing as if he’d tried to prove the existence of
God. This is a double standard. The characteristics that are deemed
most problematic in God – omnipotence and omniscience – are the
same characteristics that a programmer has relative to his programs.
This is why we write programs in the first place, to have complete
control and knowledge. We are even eternal with respect to our
programs, since we can freeze them, rewind, rerun, and predict the
future from previous iterations.
I find
it amusing when philosophers and scientists take the line that we
can’t know anything about the designer of the universe because
we’ve never seen a universe designed before. Nonsense. We all
design universes all the time, and we do it spontaneously from
birth. We do it in our imaginations, we do it using toys and making
up games, we do it telling stories and inventing myths, we do it when
we do math or make a model or a device. Everything that we design is
a universe of a sort, sometimes even explicitly so, as with
cosmological models or Conway’s Game of Life. It is the
very thing that humans do that sets them apart from other animals, to
design and most especially, to design worlds.
Every
piece of literature, every philosophy, every religion, every model in
science is a universe we have designed.
No, I
think we have a pretty good idea of the kinds of traits the designer
of our particular universe would have. We are made in his image.
It’s
why we use terms like fine-tuned in the first place. It’s not just
that the universe is tuned. It’s very finely tuned. It’s
well-crafted. The distinction brings to mind, as Luke Barnes discusses, Boltzmann’s notion that maybe our universe was created
by a random departure from thermal equilibrium. But on more careful
examination, physicists have found that this idea can’t work. If it
were true the world be way more chaotic, a violent storm ready to
wipe us back out any instant (as the Epicureans believed). As it is,
we are granted a nice big region of space, not too cold nor too hot,
and plenty of time for evolution. If we’re here by blind luck, why
are we this lucky? It would be like having your car totaled
and not only surviving the accident, but having your car come out of
the wreck shinier, newer, and a more expensive model.
If
you’re not a thermodynamicist like me, you’re probably confused.
Without going into too many details here (since then we’d have to
touch on the arrow of time, which I’d love to do but would take too
much time) let me sketch out more fully Boltzmann’s idea and
why it must be wrong.
Ludwig
Boltzmann was the physicist who discovered that you could derive the
Law of Entropy using statistics. The Law of Entropy is also called
the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You may have heard of it. Entropy
was originally a quantity measured by chemists and engineers, and it
seemed similar to energy (hence the name). Eventually they realized
that this quantity never increased within a closed system. You just
kept losing it. To get more you’d have to put in some kind of
concentrated energy like fuel or sunlight. It was Boltzmann who said,
aha! we’re really talking about ordered vs. disordered energy. He
went on to show that entropy could be precisely defined in terms of
how uncertain we are about the motions of the atoms. The disordered
motions of atoms are also known as “heat.” A system’s tendency
to disorder is why much of the energy of the fuel in your car goes
into making the engine hot. It’s why you get hot when you run
around. All that energy is getting lost in random motions of atoms.
All this was a huge revelation, because before Boltzmann people
weren’t quite sure what heat or entropy really were, they just knew
that to write down equations for how an engine works you had to
account for them.
But now
we know exactly what entropy is. It’s a kind of disorder. And after
having this realization Boltzmann’s philosophizing started going a
mile a minute. (He had many sleepless nights and even suffered from
psychosis. His fate was tragic, if you ever care to read the story.)
He started wondering how, if every closed system tends toward
disorder, there is anything like humans or plants or machines at all.
Shouldn’t everything tend toward total chaos? We get energy from
the sun, but won’t the sun eventually run out? Where did it come
from in the first place? In the long run, the universe should be at
“thermal equilibrium” -- a state where all heat has escaped in to
the vast regions of space, leaving everything cold and lifeless. This
state has come to be known as “heat death.” And according to the
inflationary models of the universe that are currently in style, it
is our probable fate.
It was
Boltzmann that first suggested that maybe our universe began in
such a state. He pointed out that, given enough time, the random
motions of atoms would eventually bring about as much order as you
like. They would all eventually come together to form stars and
planets and whatever you want. You just had to wait for it to happen.
And so, after 1010^who-knows-how-many years, our universe
finally happened. And it was bound to, assuming that time never ends.
Scratch
that. It wasn’t Boltzmann that first made this suggestion. It was
probably Leucippus (5th century BC) and if not it was
certainly either his student Democritus, or another Greek atomist.
But this is beside the point.
The
point is that this line of reasoning doesn’t work. Early in the
20th century physicists such as Arthur Eddington realized
that random motions are much much more likely to create small
universes than large ones. It’s easy to see why. You are much less
lucky to a have a few atoms come together to create a brain that
thinks, “I exist!” and mistakenly, “And look how big and
congenial the universe is!” and then die (what physicists now like
to call a “Boltzmann brain”), and much much more lucky to have a
billion trillion times more atoms coming together to create a
universe actually as congenial to life as ours.
Recall
what the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says. It says systems
tend toward disorder. Why? Because disordered states are more likely.
You can shake up that puzzle box and hope it reassembles itself. And
it could happen. It’s possible. But what’s way more likely is
that it will only become more mixed up. Since things tend toward
disorder in the future, that also means they tend toward order in the
past. So the most ordered state the universe has ever been in was its
first moment of existence. In fact it was so well-ordered that
(statistically speaking) it’s extremely more likely that we all
sprang into existence believing in the Big Bang than for the Big Bang
to have happened with as low entropy as it did.
Enough.
You either get the point of this or you don’t. No worries. All I’m
trying to say is that our universe is not just tuned. It’s
fiiiiine tuned. Whether we all sprang into existence luckily
believing that we have a history even more fined tuned than we
are, or whether our universe really has had a nice 10-billion year
run of evolutionary tuning up, man that’s some tuning.
We’re
talking luck of at least 1 in 1010^40, that is, one in
ten-to-the-ten-thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion-th. That’s even
assuming all quantum physics and gravitational forces have already
been given full-service. All we’re talking about now is
distributing ordered energy among particles after the Big Bang so
they can serve as fuel for stars, so they can pass that energy to
planets and make our plants grow. If that energy had been distributed
in some random way, the universe would have been filled with black
holes and heavier elements from the start. No stars, no life. (See
Penrose, 1979, as cited in Barnes).
Just
after the Big Bang, space was unusually smooth, but not too
smooth. If entropy had been much lower, stars and galaxies wouldn’t
have clumped together like they did. You’d just have a bunch of
hydrogen gas. So not only was our universe lucky, it had just the
right amount of luck. The amount of tuning was itself tuned.
It’s
the sort that realization that can make people a little queasy,
especially atheists.
However,
there are plenty of useful notions for helping such people stave off
theism. The most significant one in my case was the idea that you
can’t measure probabilities for one-time events after the fact. If
somebody asks, “What’s the probability that our universe came
into being,” you can just smirk and say “100%.” Because the
fact is, it did come into being. But if it were true that you
could never decide probabilities after the fact, then the U.S. Court
system would be completely useless, because all it does is decide
probabilities after the fact. Unless you think that all verdicts made
by juries are true 100% of the time, in which case you are wrong.
The
design of universes is something, as I’ve said, that humans
specialize in, so to say we can’t even contemplate the possibility
is disingenuous. If we can contemplate the possibility of our
universe randomly coming into being, we can contemplate the
possibility of it non-randomly coming into being.
Anyway,
we’ve only discussed the fine-tuning of entropy so far. Let’s
talk about the fine-tuning of the laws of nature themselves. A good
introduction to the fine-tuning of our universe’s physics is the
astrophysicist Martin Rees’s Just Six Numbers. This
book is a great introduction both to cosmology and fine-tuning, and
it’s written from a religiously neutral point of view. So it would
be a great place to start if you’re curious to know more. If
you’re a scientist or really into physics, you might take a look at
Barnes who discusses not only Rees’s six but dozens more
constants that are fine-tuned for life. Here’s a sampling of
fine-tuned parameters:
The
ratio of the strengths of electricity and gravity is small enough to
allow for planets and stars, and big enough so that multi-cellular
organisms like ourselves aren’t crushed under our own weight.
ε
measures the strength of certain nuclear forces, and if it were too
far out of range we wouldn’t have enough life-friendly atoms like
carbon and oxygen.
λ,
the cosmological constant, governs a force of anti-gravity and can’t
be too big or our universe would have flown apart before life could
evolve.
We
live in 3-dimensional space. If there were 4 dimensions, solar and
atomic orbits would be unstable. If there were 2 dimensions, complex
life would be much more difficult to support. In 1 dimension it
would be impossible.
We
have 1 dimension of time. Persistent information processing in three
dimensions requires exactly this many.
If
the scale of quantum phenomena were too small, electrons would
spiral into the nucleus and there would be no stable atoms or
molecules.
If
the down quark were a bit too heavy, there would be no neutrons and
you couldn’t form any atoms but hydrogen. If the down quark were a
bit too light, protons would be unstable and you would have no
hydrogen to fuel stars.
If
the up quark were too heavy, hydrogen could never burn to form
helium and our sun would have no fuel.
The
ratios in masses of neutrons, protons, and electrons must be just
right, or else hydrogen atoms will be unstable, nuclear reactions
will be too common, complex molecules will fall apart, or stars
won’t produce diverse enough elements for organic life.
As
I said, this is just a sampling. If you want more and you absolutely
love equations, read his whole paper.
So
the universe is fine-tuned. Fine. So what.
Stay
tuned.
III.
Evolution and Fine-Tuning
If
you think the theory of evolution has shown that God is unnecessary,
you may be getting the unsettling feeling of going backwards. The
whole reason we needed Darwin’s theory in the first place was to
explain how animals, plants, and humans are so well-adapted to their
environment. But if you could just invoke a “fine-tuning”
argument like physicists do, and take it for granted that 1 to
1010^40
odds is pretty normal when setting up a universe, then there was no
problem to begin with. Just pull a Boltzmann (or Leucippus if you
wish) and say that if you waited long enough eventually somewhere
life would randomly spring up just the way it is on earth.
But
that’s not very satisfying. And it shouldn’t be. It surprises me
that any thoughtful physicist could find the notion of a “multiverse”
satisfying as an explanation for how our universe is so special.
Multiverse?
Yeah it’s the idea that if you have enough universes to choose
from, one of them will be just right. And this is the one where life
will evolve, and then humans, and then scientists who say “Look how
special this place is, what are the chances, there must be a
multiverse!”
Barnes
admits that this notion runs into just the same problem as
Boltzmann’s. He calls it the “mediocrity test.” If you generate
your universe randomly, will your average attempt be better or worse
than ours? Unfortunately, it turns out that most proposals for a
multiverse scenario fail the mediocrity test. You end up with a bunch
of pitiful universes that are small, short-lived, and only
superficially awesome.
There
are so many variable parameters when creating a universe (is this
surprising?) that chances are that several of these variables will
end up near there extreme of their allowable range. So you’re going
to be hemmed in on several sides by hostile forces ready to destroy
everything. Granted, the world is not perfect, but its good enough
that life has survived on this planet for several billion years, and
will likely survive for several billion years more. That’s way
better than your average random universe:
1.
For example, consider the ratio of electrical and gravitational
strength. It’s high enough that creatures as big as blue whales and
the 100-ton land-bound Agentinosaurus could support their own weight,
let alone humans. It’s also low enough that we’ve already had
several generations of stars since the universe began, leaving us
with billions of years still until our own star dies.
2.
Fine-tuning is often criticized because it focuses so much on carbon.
But the point is not that carbon is the only life-giving atom. It’s
one of 118 or so known elements in our universe, while life is
theoretically possible with just 4 or 5. Why are we lucky enough to
have metals like Iron and Copper and Aluminum, as well, so essential
to civilization, but probably expendable when it comes to biological
life?
3.
The visible universe is much larger than what is needed for life.
Arguably, life just requires one star and one planet, but there are
about 100 million trillion stars in the known universe. That’s a
lot of stellar fuel that had to be just smooth enough when the
universe started. That’s a lot of unnecessary luck.
Even
the fact that we live on a relatively spacious planet is a fantastic
piece of luck. Smaller planets are going to be more common, and ton
for ton provide more surface area for life. Perhaps evolution happens
faster on large planets. But if this is the dominant effect that
would should expect to be on a planet so large that complex,
intelligent life can just barely evolve before it’s too big to
support its own weight, especially since intelligence is harder to
evolve than strength.
Which
brings us back to evolution. Now the theory of evolution is very
similar to the multiverse theory. Both of them invoke a kind of
selection to explain what would otherwise be some piece of
astronomical luck. On the one hand you have a bunch of random
universes, and only those few with intelligent life know they exist,
and on the other you’ve got a bunch of random mutations, and only
those few that enhance survival pass themselves on to future
generations.
But
the problem with multiverse theories, as we’ve discussed, is that
that they ask for too little. All that’s selected is some fleeting
intelligence that knows that it exists. And that is why that’s all
the theory produces, sudden bursts of life that are quickly overtaken
by chaos. It’s like the unavoidable problem of teachers who teach
to the exam. Students cram and then forget. Everything will tend to
the lowest common denominator.
Biological
evolution on our world asks for much more. It asks for survival, a
kind of persistence. It asks for flourishing, for a pressing against
the environment, for vivacity and strength. As I discuss in my book, it even asks for compassion, diversity, generosity, and
spirituality.
I’m
not saying that mutation and natural selection automatically produce
these things. Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection is a universal,
mathematical law. It simply states that, given finite resources,
populations that grow faster will overtake populations that grow more
slowly. This is logical, even tautological. It’s the survival of
that which can survive. Without any other insight, you would expect
organisms to be as fast and mean as possible, viruses that replicate
out of control. In fact, in most early artificial life simulations,
this is exactly the kinds of computer programs that evolved, as I
describe in my previous post. I’ve spent some time playing
around with artificial life myself and seeing if I could create
interesting domesticated computer viruses. But it turns out to be
incredibly hard. You have to set up just the right rules of the game
so that (1) they don’t take over your hard drive and destroy your
computer (yes, this happened to a professor I knew), (2) they don’t
get smaller and smaller and simpler and simpler so they can reproduce
extra fast, (3) they don’t become virulent parasites that exploit
other organisms and destroy the ecosystem, and (4) they start out
with the right sort of DNA to show interesting behavior without
having it all preprogrammed. In short, it’s a challenge to make
them show any interesting behavior at all aside from copying
themselves.
Evolution
on earth has solved all these sorts of issues. We take it for
granted, but how well it has done so is a fantastic example of fine
tuning:
1.
If life were able to exploit the laws of nature down to the most
fundamental level, rather than being constrained to mainly chemical
reactions, it would harness nuclear energy and start breaking down
the very elements that make up our earth. With so much energy at its
disposal, life would explode exponentially and consume all its
nuclear fuel before it could develop into anything interesting.
2.
If life didn’t have to compete for energy and so many different
kinds of resources, or if this competition were based solely on
efficiency (which is the case in most naive artificial life
experiments, and would be the case in our world if space travel were
easy or resources over-abundant), everything would tend towards
simple self-replication and nothing complex could evolve.
3.
If ecosystems had not quickly evolved so much diversity, a single
parasitic organism could have destroyed everything very early on (as
they often do in artificial life experiments and modern mono-crop
agriculture).
4.
Somehow self-replication on earth got started, of just the right sort
that it could evolve into cells, organisms, and robust ecosystems,
and diversify exponentially over the eons. How life with such
adaptive potential got started in the first place is still an open
question in biology. DNA seems to play a basic role in our
adaptability, but it seems prohibitively unlikely for it to have
randomly come together and replicate itself without all the other
adaptive mechanisms of the cell.
That
the process of evolution itself is fine-tuned is another subtle
embarrassment for the atheistic scientist who thought Darwin had
banished God entirely. They tend to come back to another variant of
multiverse hypothesis. They point to the fact that if there are 100
million trillion solar systems out there, a few of them are bound to
be just right for life to appear.
Most
scientists are content to leave it at that, but it strikes me that
this theory might fail the Mediocrity Test the way other multiverse
theories do.
Let’s
consider two options, then.
The
first option is for some kind of life to appear in one of the 100
million trillion systems that has all the characteristics listed
above, plus anything I failed to mention, and solves any other
gotchas. There are bound to be a ton of gotchas—surprise
problems—any time you’re designing anything. As a computer
programmer I know that your initial design will almost never work,
and things will end up being at least three times more complicated
than you thought they were, as seen in early artificial life
experiments. And your gotchas will have gotchas. Not only are we
evolving life, but intelligent life capable of contemplating all
this, and with all the future evolutionary potential of humanity.
Because not only is it great luck that we exist, but that we seem to
have a long future ahead of us. (Doomsday scenarios abound, but I
have yet to encounter a good argument that humans are about to go
extinct. Our civilization will almost certainly collapse though, a
common fate that has happened to many civilizations before ours. It
is not fatal and I argue it’s needed for renewal. For more
discussion, please see Progress Debunked.)
The
second option is for some fleeting intelligence to appear in some
primordial soup that merely believes
that
everything from option 1 is true. Due to the existence of gotchas,
and the fact that your gotchas will have gotchas, this is a much
simpler requirement, because all it requires is the momentary
appearance of wishful thinking, and not a several billion year run of
just the right environment for the evolution of intelligence.
Unfortunately, in a random space of possibilities, the simpler
explanation is going to be the most likely.
So
option 2 is far far more likely in a random world than option 1. If
life arose by pure chance, we are really just some randomly
interacting chemicals in a tidal pool on some hostile world, our
beautiful green Earth is almost certainly a mirage, and we’re about
to dissolve back into the chaotic soup from which we came.
All
I’m saying is, you don’t get something for nothing. There is,
once again, no free lunch. If evolution generated order for free, all
computer programs would be evolutionary algorithms. Programmers would
have realized this long ago because they love
to automate things. If pure creativity could be automated by the
evolutionary process, all problems would have been solved by the
discovery of evolution. But this is far from the truth. In reality,
evolution is just one algorithm among many that can help in the
design of a system. It is not a designer, but simply a process that
translates information from one form to another. In the case of life
on earth, evolution translated order found in the sun, in the earth’s
environment, and in the entire set up of the universe into the order
found in organisms.
There
is a quantity in computer science called “Kolmogorov complexity.”
It is defined as the length of the shortest computer program that
will generate a given pattern. It’s a useful concept because it
lets you think about the “true” complexity of a pattern as
opposed to its apparent complexity. Assuming that human intelligence
is truly complex, the fact is that it could
not have been generated by any process less complex than itself. This
follows from the very definition of algorithmic complexity. This
explains why, every time we demand that intelligence be explained by
a simple process, we are forced to the conclusion that all the
complex order of our world is a mirage.
So
in fact every time we learn something new about the history of life
and the universe, every time we explain something in terms of
something else, every law we discover and every cosmic pattern we
reveal, we are only making the ultimate
explanation
harder.
People like to say that science is leaving fewer and fewer gaps for
God. But the truth is the opposite. The more science learns, the more
gotchas that are discovered in need of a God.
The
entire process of evolution, with all of its millions of species
coming into being and passing away, striving in unfathomably complex
ecological webs over billions of generations, is far more complex
than the human brain. Sure, evolution explains the human brain, but
it opens up an even vaster region of knowledge to be explained. You
can appeal to the 100 million trillion worlds in the visible
universe, but now you’ve got an even bigger gotcha on your hands, a
universe that had to start with an entropy so low it’s less likely
than a brain randomly popping into and out of existence. Finally,
that all the laws of the universe have been so congenial from the
start, smoothing things out with anti-gravity while keeping them just
lumpy enough by gravity, keeping stars and planets from collapsing
with just the right electric force and binding atoms together with a
nuclear force strong but not too strong ... we’re talking about
mathematics so complex and tuned to our needs that to deny a creator
is ultimately to demand that every
logically possible universe
exists ... which of course would include universes with a creator. So
why not?
IV.
Mediocrity and the Meaning of Life
The
mediocrity test, used persistently, is fatal to all
appeals to blind chance. Even in evolution. Yes, I agree that life on
earth evolved by random mutation ... and
natural selection!
It did not arise by mutation alone. It could have very easily. Just
assume a giant universe with lots of time, and pure mutation will
give you whatever you want. But then, of course, you get everything
you don’t want, and you get forms of life too stupid for words, and
the overwhelming probability that we are one of them.
No,
you need selection. Selection is a necessary ingredient for good
design. Selection is
design.
It is the hand of God, as I explained in my previous post.
Selection
goes all the way up. Your forces of selection must themselves be
selected. You don’t solve anything by saying that given enough
worlds in the universe eventually one of them will have the right
forces of selection for the evolution of intelligence. Chances are
you’ll mostly get the evolution of stupidity that thinks it’s
intelligence, which is always easier. No, the best selection is
carefully selected selection. And that
selection
is selected, all the way up to God.
I
find it funny that atheists invented the mediocrity test, and use it
without their illusions crumbling. Because if the more likely
possibility is that your brain sprang into existence having all the
thoughts it does and will soon be destroyed by impending chaos, then
why don’t physicists simply accept
this
conclusion and give up all hope? How is this a reductio
ad absurdum
at all unless you demand
that
life have meaning?
It
is disingenuous of atheists to continually harp on the lack of
meaning in the universe, but to reject the most probable hypothesis
on this view—that the world is entirely
mediocre
and devoid of meaning, a blip in a vast sea of chaos. It’s an
hypothesis that the Epicureans were at least honest enough to embrace
more fully. Lucretius claimed that the plagues and earthquakes
hitting Rome (this was during its long decline) were a sign that the
world would soon come to end. Perhaps there are a few honest
fatalists like this today, but it would seem they are in the minority
among scientists, who still work on their theories day to day as if
even our very civilization were immune to decay. It’s ironic.
The
truth is that, as I’ve said, atheists do believe in meaning. You
have to. Life presupposes it. If what you do is to matter, it must be
grounded in the past and an influence on the future. It requires a
history, a world, a vast arena for action. Meaningful action is not
possible in the midst of pure chaos. It would dissolve like a gas.
There
is meaning. There is order in life. It’s an ancient idea, going
back to the Proto-Indo-European root
*reg- which
underlies words in many languages across Eurasia for direction,
leadership, and
rule.
Modern
words that come from this root include regal,
rectitude,
righteous, and
regulate.
In ancient religions and Greek philosophy there is a common
principle that the universe is infused with and guided by order and
reason. The Greeks also called this principle logos.
The gospel of John, originally written in Greek, starts: “In the
beginning was the logos,
and the logos
was
with God, and God was the logos.”
Order
is design. It is fine-tuning. Our universe is fine-tuned. It is
manifestly designed. Maybe it did involve randomness. Maybe our
history was written by one of a hundred million trillion monkeys on
typewriters typing for 1040
years. But even then it involved selection too, it involved the
recognition that one of those histories was meaningful. That this is
possible at all, that we are contemplating the meaning of life, is
proof that there is
meaning.
And
if there is meaning, there is a highest meaning. And that highest
meaning is called divine. It is called God.
And
this God must necessarily be personal. A god that just hangs around
in the background tweaking parameters, who treats the world as a
plaything, does nothing to give that world meaning.
Any
being complex enough to create our universe is practically infinite
and beyond full comprehension, let alone scientific comprehension.
But we can comprehend aspects of God, and we can understand much
about His creativity because we are creators too.
Everything
that humans create has a purpose. That is to say, everything we
create has a meaning. The meaning of art is hard to explain, and
that’s because it goes very deep. And when it does not go deep we
know it lacks purpose. The same is true for philosophy and religion.
And this is why the fact that the universe is designed is the same as
the fact that it has meaning. To say that there is a creator is to
say that there is more than what we see around us, a higher context
providing it with value.
Many
have argued that if our universe is a computer program, our
Programmer may not be all powerful or benevolent, but just more
complex that we are, in some higher-dimensional universe. But once
again our explanation has expanded the realm of things that need
explaining. Where did the Programmer come from? Is there another
level of simulated reality above the next? Where does it all end?
But
this is all that is meant when we say that God is infinite. There
could be any number of levels. It all depends on the ultimate design,
which will forever be beyond our (finite) comprehension. The point is
not to finally know everything once and for all, but to allow
ourselves to be awed by the mystery and to learn to trust the higher
power. Full comprehension is impossible. It is faith that is
ultimately called for.
Self-styled
atheists say that our universe came into being without meaning, and
that meaning is a human invention. This is why atheists tend to think
of meaning in relativistic or subjective terms. “Make your own
meaning,” they say. But in reality this is impossible. No
arbitrarily-invented value is likely to survive the test of natural
selection. And if it does, it is natural selection that deserves the
credit and not you. Because without some pre-defined set of values
there are no criteria by which to choose new values, and anything you
create, lacking both context and meaning, will be random.
Atheists
say God is unlikely to exist. But actually it is atheists that are
unlikely to exist. In reality even those who call themselves atheists
must believe in meaning. And in any system of value, there is
automatically defined some highest value. You can say that our
universe is only one among countless, and that it is only so friendly
to life because otherwise we wouldn’t be around to ask “why.”
But now this very picture becomes your portrait—certainly crude—of
God. Asking “why” becomes the meaning and purpose of your
universe. And it should not be surprising that scientists are the
most likely to adore such a portrait, because their very purpose in
life is asking “why.” So they worship the God of Why. For them,
the whys do not end. Connecting facts to other facts is their
personal quest. It was my personal quest for several years until I
found that I needed more than this out of life.
The
strong desire to explain is what makes many scientists blind to their
own theism. Because as soon as God is introduced it makes the game
too easy. The rest of us get impatient with all the endless facts and
say, “But God must enter somewhere.”
And this is misunderstood to mean that we believe in God despite the
evidence. But the fact of the matter is, that all
the evidence supports God and must, because He is everyone's
presupposition, that is, we only care to discuss anything because we
suppose that life has value. So we all in fact agree that the
ultimate source of value must come in somewhere. It is the so-called
atheist that is being unreasonable here because he puts off the
question indefinitely.
You
can assume what you want about how
our universe came to be. Maybe there are infinite universes and some
kind of natural selection among them. Or maybe our universe has a
creator, and so does the next, and there is an infinite hierarchy of
creators. Either way you will never be done explaining. You will
never get to the why.
So
if we want to speak of God let's speak of Him—the Prime Mover.
Design
theorists are somewhat to blame because they also misrepresent
themselves. Their purpose is not to stop explanation, like a child
who jealously wants to stop others from playing a game he is less
good at, but actually to point out that explanation can go on forever
because God is infinite. And every level of explanation—each law of
nature, each parameter of the Big Bang, each aspect of evolution—is
meaningful because it adds to the total complexity, luckiness, and
meaningfulness of our universe.
V.
Proof and Mysticism
The
fine-tuning argument cannot prove God. It cannot even prove that our
universe has a designer. But the fundamental reason for this is
different from what many scientists and philosophers suppose. They
say we can’t agree on a solution because we can’t agree on the
“prior probabilities.” This is true, but it is not the
fundamental
reason.
Let
me explain briefly what prior
probabilities are.
Say a new disease is spreading, A-itis. You go to the doctor and get
tested, and the doctor says, “Look, I’ve got bad news. You’ve
tested positive for this fatal disease, A-itis. It’s looking pretty
bad. The test for A-itis is 99.99% accurate. But there is still hope.
If you don’t have A-itis, there’s a 1/10,000 chance of a false
positive.”
Slim
comfort. Those odds sound horrible, right? If only 1/10,000 of people
test positive who don’t have A-itis, it sort of sounds like you
have a 9,999/10,000 chance of dying. But this is false. Because the
chance of having A-itis could be much lower than the chance of
testing positive. What you’re missing is the prior
probability
of having A-itis. Realizing this, you go back to the doctor and ask,
“What’s the prior probability of having A-itis?” He tells you,
“Well, about 1 in 10,000,000.” This is fantastic news. 1/10,000
is the same as 1,000/10,000,00. So given 10 million people, only 1
person will actually have A-itis, while 1,000 people will get a false
positive. So the odds are still only one in a thousand that you
actually have the disease.
Unless
you have some idea what the prior probabilities are, any tests, any
evidence for one conclusion or another will be inconclusive.
Earlier
we discussed the problem of entropy. We pointed out that the luck of
having such low entropy at the beginning of the universe, to have
such a nice smooth distribution of fuel for stars, was something like
1 in 1010^40,
if the particles were spread randomly through space. A theist will
point out that the odds look much better for a universe designed for
life, because now the chances are 100% that the entropy will be low
enough for life to form.
But
this does not by itself prove theism, because we’re missing the
prior probability that there is a creator in the first place. If the
odds against having a creator are much less than 1 in 1010^40,
then our universe is still probably random.
It
is here that people tend to throw up their hands. How do you
determine the prior probability of a creator? Especially when not
everyone agrees on his characteristics? It all seems to boil down to
assumptions, things that can’t be proven. It seems like agnosticism
is the only reasonable position. And in fact, reading the scientific
literature on fine-tuning, it seems that agnosticism is the dominant
mood.
I
doubt that any amount of fine-tuning evidence, no matter how good,
will break this agnostic mood.
But
that’s all it is, a mood. It’s a willful avoidance of the
question of ultimate meaning. Again, to believe in meaning at all is
to believe in ultimate meaning. To believe in order or design at all
is to believe in ultimate order and design. To say that meaning and
order spring spontaneously from chaos is to deny that they are really
meaning
or order.
And
even this line of argument, I suspect, will lead us in a circle.
“Sure, let’s deny that meaning or order really
exist,” you say. “So what? Science has revealed a meaningless
universe.” And I’ll just say again that it’s undeniable that
there is meaning in my life and in yours.
I’ve
said that every explanation, every cause, is not evidence against God
but evidence for God. As John writes, “All things came into being
through him [the logos],
and without him not one thing has come into being.” Explanation is
connection. To uncover the history of the world or the universe is to
connect the present to the past. To speak of the purpose of life is
to connect the present to the future. Taken to its limit, the mood of
explanation is a mood of connection. Taken to its limit, the search
for the ultimate cause, for the theory of everything, is the search
for how all things connect with all things. No, it’s not
pure facts
or pure logic,
but rather when this mood of connection has coupled
with facts and logic at the limits of your comprehension, and
such full consciousness has
reached
its climax, when everything
has
been brought to touch this awareness—not just atoms and galaxies
and laws of nature, but humanity and civilization and life and
evolution and suffering and joy and death and birth and belief and
love and hate and poetry and myth and nature and beauty and
compassion and faith and courage and goodness and everything
that matters in life—when
all of this has been seen as
logically whole as possible
in its fine-tuned fullness of purpose (and who could really
see
it whole but God)—and when this fullness of the world has overcome
your intellect, your ego so
that your very conception of yourself has dissolved into divine
immensity—then and only then does conversion occur.
