Monthly Archives: November 2013

The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg

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The author is a professor of philosophy at Duke University who usually writes books for other philosophers and people who aspire to be philosophers. This one was written for a general audience. Maybe that’s why the book comes on so strong. Borrowing Nietzsche’s phrase, it’s philosophy with a hammer.

I assume Professor Rosenberg chose the title, but it’s a little misleading. Rosenberg derives his atheism from a more fundamental view called “scientism”. He defines that as the worldview according to which “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything”. Unfortunately, there is no word that refers to someone who accepts scientism except “scientist” and you can definitely be a scientist without believing in scientism. Plus, a title like The Guide to Reality for People Who Accept Scientism isn’t exactly catchy. So “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality” it is.

One way Rosenberg explains scientism is to say that physics fixes all the facts (except, presumably, for the facts of logic or mathematics). Physics says that all events in the history of the universe, except some at the quantum level, are determined by previous events and the laws of nature. Furthermore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy ultimately increases in an isolated system) is the “driving force” behind evolution, which is the result of haphazard genetic mutation. Evolution gave us minds, but our minds are nothing more than the activity of our brains.

Rosenberg concludes that we don’t have free will, introspection is generally misleading and thoughts (whether conscious or unconscious) aren’t “about” anything (since what happens in a neuron can’t be “about” anything — it’s just a tiny input/output device). Furthermore, there are no purposes in nature, even in our minds, and there are no ethical facts. Morality is just another evolutionary adaptation. In addition, we can learn nothing from history or economics, since human culture is constantly evolving.

Rosenberg expresses his conclusions with an air of almost absolute certainty, which is odd for someone who believes in science (maybe it’s not so odd for someone who believes in scientism). For example, he says that “what we know about physical and biological science makes the existence of God less probable than the existence of Santa Claus”. Perhaps he’s being facetious in that passage, but many atheist or agnostic philosophers would agree that God’s existence is a metaphysical question beyond the reach of science. Natural processes don’t count for or against the supernatural. Besides which, there is no evidence at all for the existence of Santa Claus.

Cosmic Justice

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According to the Detroit News, a 19-year old black woman, Renisha McBride, had a car accident in the predominantly white suburb of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, at around 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Her cell phone battery was dead, so she began looking for help. After knocking on the door or ringing the bell at a house on Outer Drive, she was shot in the head and killed. The Dearborn Heights police department found her body on the front porch. They know who killed her but haven’t released the person’s name.

Michigan is one of the states that now has a “Stand Your Ground” law. Michigan’s law says that a person has the right to use deadly force against another person if he or she “reasonably” believes such force is necessary to protect himself, herself or someone else from imminent death, great bodily harm or sexual assault. Given the facts reported so far, asking the woman ringing your door bell at 2:30 a.m. what she wanted or calling 911 would have been more reasonable than putting a bullet through her head. The incident is now in the hands of the Wayne County prosecutor.

In news that could be related, physicists have discovered that the Higgs field, what the New York Times calls “an invisible ocean of energy that permeates space, confers mass on elementary particles and gives elementary forces their distinct features and strengths” might undergo a phase transition resulting from a random quantum-level fluctuation. This phase transition would make the Higgs field much denser than it is now. That change would destroy everything in the universe more complex than hydrogen, the simplest element there is. 

In fact, a random fluctuation of this kind might have already occurred, meaning that the resulting phase transition (in effect, a wave of destruction traveling at the speed of light) might be heading for us right now. We won’t know if it’s coming or notice if it arrives: “the idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it”.

It would be as if Someone finally got fed up and turned off the cosmic switch that controls everything around us, including Dearborn Heights, Michigan.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view of cosmic justice, it is very, very unlikely that the Higgs field will change any time soon. Nevertheless, it could happen, especially if Someone gets really fed up.

Update:  Apparently, it was a man who killed Renisha McBride. He did it with a shotgun and says it was an accident. He also says he thought she was an intruder (the kind who knocks on the front door or rings the bell?).  

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The death of Renisha McBride:  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131105/METRO01

The Higgs field: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/finding-the-higgs-leads-to-more-puzzles

A nice, 14-minute video that explains how very unlikely it is that the lights will go out while we’re still around: http://www.ted.com/talks/why_our_universe_might_exist_on_a_knife_edge

Why It’s So Quiet Out There

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Many of us fondly remember Carl Sagan proclaiming on television that there are billions and billions of stars in the universe. So much for memory, because it was Johnny Carson and his fellow comedians who spoke the phrase “billions and billions” when they did their impressions of the professor. Sagan often said “billion” and “billions” in his Cosmos program, but the closest he ever came to saying “billions and billions” was apparently this:

There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a 100 billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe…. We find that we live on an insignificant planet, of a humdrum star, lost in a galaxy, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe, in which there are far more galaxies than people.

But if there are billions and billions of stars and who knows how many planets, why is the universe so quiet? Shouldn’t we detect some signals from other worlds?

Part of the answer is that radio waves and similar signals get weaker the farther they travel. An inhabited planet would have to be fairly close to Earth, maybe less than ten light-years away, for us to distinguish its version of “I Love Lucy” or its “anyone out there?” message from the general cosmic noise.

And, despite a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there may not be a terrifically large number of habitable planets in our galaxy (the nearest stand-alone galaxy is two million light years from the Milky Way, so those billions and billions of other galaxies aren’t really relevant to the discussion).

The science academy report says there are (depending on which news story you read) between nine and forty billion planets in the Milky Way similar to Earth. In this case, “similar” means having about the same mass as Earth and being at the right distance from their respective suns to have liquid water on their surface. Whether it’s nine billion or forty billion, it seems like a pretty big number, so articles in the news media are generally implying that we probably aren’t alone.

On the other hand, the galaxy is a very big place and life may be extremely rare. If the odds against life coming into existence on an Earth-like planet and then evolving into something like us are one billion to one, there are now between nine and forty planets in the galaxy capable of producing situation comedies. It would be very odd if any of them were close enough for us to notice. In this context, therefore, forty billion would be a rather small number.  

Maybe we aren’t completely alone in the universe, but even with these new findings, we should get used to the idea that we’re stuck with each other (and make the best of it).

Update: A physicist wonders about the likelihood of life coming into existence. We don’t know what the odds are:

…if life arose simply by the accumulation of many specific chemical accidents in one place, it is easy to imagine that only one in, say, a trillion trillion habitable planets would ever host such a dream run. Set against a number that big — and once you decide a series of unlikely accidents is behind the creation of life, you get enormous odds very easily — it is irrelevant whether the Milky Way contains 40 billion habitable planets or just a handful. Forty billion makes hardly a dent in a trillion trillion.

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One of the news stories:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/cosmic-census-finds-billions-of-planets-that-could-be-like-earth.html

What Carl Sagan had to say:

People Come and Go So Quickly Here

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It’s estimated that there were 1 billion human beings in 1800. We made it to 7 billion in 2011. With that many people doing what people do, we’ll hit 8 billion in another 15 years or so, assuming nothing out of the ordinary happens.

The Atlantic has “A Real-Time Map of Births and Deaths”. It’s an impressive visual simulation of the world’s rapid and uneven population growth. It’s based on statistics, of course, since we haven’t yet reached the point where every birth and death is instantly recorded (unless someone isn’t telling us). 

By the way, the United States is the 3rd most populous country in the world, after China and India. For some reason, I find that surprising (maybe I got used to the Soviet Union being in the 3rd position). The Census Bureau provides the latest estimated numbers for America and the world on their population clock:  http://www.census.gov/popclock/