Category Archives: Science

A Guide to Reality, Part 9

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Alex Rosenberg begins chapter 4 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by pointing out how wasteful biological processes are. For example, a frog or fish may lay thousands or even millions of eggs and only produce a few offspring. Many organisms go through an entire life cycle without having any offspring at all. In addition, 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, partly as the result of various prehistoric cataclysms (like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Rosenberg says this is what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “a lot of order relentlessly turned into entropy” [75]: 

Can any process produce entropy as fast as natural selection?… Build a lot of complicated devices out of simpler things and then destroy all of them except the few you need to build more such devices… [Adaptations] persistently get more complicated and so use even more energy to build and maintain themselves…. Any process competing with natural selection as the source of adaptations has to produce adaptations from non-adaptations and every one of the adaptations it produces will have to be rare, expensive and wasteful [77].

However, Rosenberg’s main thesis in this chapter is that it’s logically impossible to reconcile God and Darwin (although many have tried). He begins with the traditional idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent (aside from being unable to perform impossible tasks like creating a rock so heavy He or She can’t lift it). Rosenberg also assumes for the sake of argument that God intended to create us or something like us “in His image”.

So, assuming that God knows everything, can do anything, and wanted us to exist, how can we harmonize God and evolution? The common approach is to suggest that God used evolution to make us, either by kicking off the process long ago, knowing it would eventually lead to us, or by manipulating evolution at key points, with the same result. In other words, evolution is part of God’s plan.

A problem with this idea, as Rosenberg explains, is that natural selection is a matter of probabilities. That’s what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Mutations just happen. Organisms that might do very well never get the chance because of some random event (like being eaten while still in the nest). There is no guarantee that particular species will evolve. That’s what science tells us.

If God cooked the evolutionary books, therefore, interfering with the randomness of evolution, Darwin got it wrong. We didn’t evolve in the way the theory predicts. On the other hand, if God let evolution take its random course, He or She didn’t know what the result would be. Our evolution wasn’t planned. Either evolution is a random, probabilistic process or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

My guess is that a proponent of intelligent design or creationism would say “so much for evolution”. It doesn’t work exactly like the biologists say. So what? Or that God in His infinite wisdom can arrange things any way He wants. It’s all way beyond our understanding.

Personally, I don’t have any religious faith that needs to be reconciled with Darwinism. But what if you’re serious about reconciling your faith and your scientific views? Is there a good response to Rosenberg’s argument?

I think there is. My first reaction to Rosenberg’s argument in chapter 4 is that he seems to be ignoring something he discussed in chapter 2, namely, the “multiverse”. As Rosenberg pointed out, many theoretical physicists, perhaps most of them, think that our universe is just one among many, where “many” could be a truly vast number, even an infinite number. But if there really is a multiverse, it seems beyond question that people like us were certain to evolve in universes here or there, given enough time and randomness. God, being omniscient, could have initiated the multiverse knowing full well that people just like us would eventually exist in some of its parts. If anyone would, God would understand that if you roll the dice often enough, you’ll eventually get all the combinations.

Along with Rosenberg, we can accept the fact that evolution is a truly random process in our universe. It might even be a random process in every universe. But if there are enough universes around, pretty much everything will end up evolving somewhere or other many, many times. If that’s God’s plan, there is no conflict with the Second Law or the theory of evolution. God and Darwin can be reconciled.

My other reaction to Rosenberg’s argument is that he should take into account what physicists and many philosophers say about the nature of time. I have trouble with the idea, but the current scientific view of time is that all moments are equally real. Ours is a “block” universe in which there is no past, present or future; there is merely earlier and later. It isn’t clear to me at all how the universe can be probabilistic and physical events truly random if what’s going to happen is just as real as what did happen, but that’s what physicists believe. I guess it just means the past doesn’t fully determine the future at the quantum level, even though future events are just as real as past events. 

Anyway, if anyone can reconcile quantum indeterminacy and a block universe, it’s God. After all, according to the theologians, God is outside of time (whatever that means). God isn’t sitting around, waiting to see what happens. As Rosenberg says, God is “omnipresent”, which means there is nothing in space or time that is off-limits to God. Being omniscient as well, God knows the whole story. That should be especially easy for God if earlier and later events in the story are equally real.

For that reason, even if evolution is random and inherently unpredictable, God is fully informed. Every event, earlier or later, is right there in the history of the universe for God to know about. If what physics tells us is true, it’s a perfect setup for someone like God, being outside of time, to know how evolution eventually leads to people like us. Randomness prevails, Darwinism is correct and God knows the whole story anyway. If indeterminacy and the supposed nature of time are in harmony, so are physics, Darwin and God. 

Rosenberg ends chapter 4 with some remarks on purpose:

Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well….There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the universe. It’s just one damn thing after another. Real purpose has been ruled out by physics [92].

I don’t think he’s right about that, but to avoid repeating myself, we’re going to move on. In our next installment, we’ll consider chapter 5. It’s called “Morality: the Bad News” (the good news supposedly comes later).

We’re Causing Global Warming 2158, the Other Side 1

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There is a commonly-cited statistic to the effect that 97% of scientists believe that we are causing global climate change. Here’s another statistic:

James Powell, a geochemist and head of the National Physical Science Consortium, has surveyed the peer-reviewed articles in science journals published between November 2012 and December 2013. He found that among the 2,258 articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors, there was only one article by one author who rejected man-made climate change.

But, according to Powell, even the author of that article believes the climate is getting warmer — he just thinks it’s for other reasons, like deforestation. He also happens to be a Russian scientist who expresses concern in his article that Russia will lose income if people stop using so much oil.

So much for the idea that scientists who study the issue are in disagreement, or that there is “pseudo-science by the bucketful” on both sides of the argument (a claim I recently read on another blog). That’s what the global warming-deniers want us to think.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/01/08/why-climate-deniers-have-no-scientific-credibility-only-1-9136-study-authors-rejects-global-warming

A Guide to Reality, Part 8

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Chapter 3 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is called “How Physics Fakes Design”, although Professor Rosenberg would be the first to object that physics isn’t the kind of thing that can fake anything. His point, of course, is that everything that looks like it’s been designed in the natural world (the human eye, for example) is merely the result of activity at the atomic and molecular level, which itself results from subatomic particles doing what they normally do.

In fact, Professor Rosenberg holds that things that really were designed (like your computer) are the result of the very same natural laws. Design, wherever it appears to occur, whether the result of evolution or conscious effort, is just another illusion. 

In this chapter, however, Rosenberg is focused on evolutionary adaptation:

If the physical facts fix all the facts, then the emergence and persistence of adaptations had better result from the laws of physics alone. In fact, they had better be the result of the operation of thermodynamics. Otherwise we will have to admit that there is more going on in the universe than physics tells us there is. Some physicists may be okay with this, but scientism has to reject it. We need to show that the process Darwin discovered starts with zero adaptations and builds them all as the result of the laws of physics alone. (51-52).

Rosenberg begins by offering a statement of the three essential features of the theory of natural selection, as stated by the biologist Richard Lewontin:

  1. There is always variation in the traits of organisms, genes, hives, groups or whatever it is that replicates or reproduces;
  2. The variant traits differ in fitness;
  3. The fitness differences among some of the traits are inherited.

As Rosenberg explains, the replication or reproduction that occurs in nature doesn’t always result in an exact copy being made (mutations occur, for example). He prefers calling this “blind variation” instead of “random variation” to emphasize the point that nature doesn’t cause these variations on purpose. Most such variations yield no benefit. Occasionally, one does. A “beneficial” variation is one that tends to be passed on to the next generation. Given enough time, such variations can result in complex structures like the eye. Evolution occurs.  

Getting back to physics, Rosenberg argues that the second law of thermodynamics (closed systems tend toward disorder) makes natural selection “inevitable” (although at the end of the chapter he says that the second law only makes it “possible”). He admits that the relationship between the second law and natural selection is puzzling, since natural selection seems to increase the amount of order or organization in the world. But he quickly disposes of this objection by pointing out that the second law only requires a “net increase” in disorder over time. Organization will occasionally increase, but almost always at the cost of more disorganization elsewhere (as when organisms grow by digesting food).

Next, in the space of 11 interesting pages, Rosenberg shows how molecular activity, all subject to the second law, results in what he calls “molecular evolution” (69). As he explains it, there is a lot of “thermodynamic noise” in the universe. Molecules are constantly copying themselves, sometimes imperfectly, and forming bonds with each other. These processes result in new molecular forms. Some molecules are more stable than others, meaning that they will tend to last longer in particular chemical environments. As environments change, however, certain molecules become less stable and break apart, while others come together, just as organisms adapt or fail to adapt to changes in their environments. These various processes satisfy the criteria for evolution described above:

Natural selection requires … reproduction, variation and inheritance. It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations. Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction. Any kind of replication is enough (59).

The same goes for variation and inheritance. I would add that these processes must occur in an environment filled with enough matter and energy to keep things moving along. Then, through the course of countless such chemical interactions over immense periods of time, complex organic molecules can develop:

Thermodynamic noise constantly makes more and more different environments – different temperatures, different pH, different concentrations of chemicals, different amounts of water or oxygen or nitrogen, or more complicated acids and bases, magnetic fields and radiation. As a result, there will be a corresponding selection for more and more different molecules (69).

And here we are today, each of us a collection of atoms and molecules, each doing its individual thing:

And so on up the ladder of complexity and diversity that produces assemblies of molecules so big they become recognizable as genes, viruses, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms … and us (69).

Not being a scientist myself, I can’t vouch for Rosenberg’s account of how all this works. However, it all sounds plausible to me. If you read the chapter, you will probably feel the same way.

One closing comment: people who don’t accept the fact that natural selection could eventually lead to a particular complex entity usually argue that such a thing couldn’t possibly happen. It’s inconceivable, they might say, that the human eye, which needs a bunch of parts that work together in order to work at all, could have resulted from a long series of evolutionary steps. It was Charles Darwin himself who offered the human eye as the biggest challenge to his theory. Rosenberg mentions this issue near the beginning of this chapter but doesn’t return to it. His goal in chapter 3 is to show how adaptation gets started, not how far it can go. I think, however, that it’s unwise to bet against science in its pursuit of explanations for mysterious things like the human eye or consciousness. Too many phenomena that used to be mysterious have already been explained.

In our next installment (assuming I stay sufficiently motivated): Good design isn’t just an illusion, it’s also rare, expensive and accidental.

The Polar Vortex vs. the Noise Vortex

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Many of us cold people now know about the polar vortex. Rush Limbaugh, however, doubts its existence, suggesting it’s part of a hoax perpetrated by the all-powerful liberal media. (That’s entertainment, folks!) Weatherman Al Roker responds with a passage from a 1959 textbook published by the American Meteorological Society:

polar vortex – the large-scale cyclonic circulation in the middle and upper troposphere centered generally in the polar regions.

Meanwhile, the White House science and technology advisor takes two minutes to explain the possible relationship between global climate change and the arrival of the polar vortex in places like St. Louis. It turns out that we hadn’t heard of the polar vortex before because it hasn’t visited us very often. Visits are now more likely. 

A Guide to Reality, Part 7

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In the final pages of chapter 2 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Alex Rosenberg turns to some big, persistent questions he believes are now answered by physics.

– Where did the universe come from, how long ago, and where is it going?

Rosenberg accepts the standard view that the universe began with a “big bang” about 13.75 billion years ago (13.80 according to the latest Wikipedia update). The universe started out extremely hot and extremely dense and has been expanding ever since, creating spacetime, subatomic particles, the elements, stars and galaxies along the way. The expansion seems to be speeding up, but it’s not clear why.

Rosenberg gives the impression that the universe began as a tiny sphere, reaching the size of an orange in much less than a second. The physicist who answers questions at the “Ask a Physicist” website, however, says that the universe didn’t really explode from a tiny point, despite what every documentary and planetarium show implies. He says we should think of the early universe as being like an infinite, very hot, very dense rubber sheet that suddenly began to stretch (although he admits that it’s hard to picture something infinite becoming larger without doing the math). 

One aspect of the big bang that’s always bothered me is its location. Physicists often imply that it didn’t have a location, since spacetime didn’t exist before the big bang occurred. Rosenberg, however, says there is a small region of space where the cosmic background radiation is more intense than anywhere else. He refers to this as “the source of the big bang”. The “Ask a Physicist” physicist says that the oldest light we can detect came from somewhere 46 billion light-years away, much further away than the 14 light-years we would expect from the age of the universe (the difference is the effect of cosmic expansion). So if there is a region of space some 46 billion light-years away that appears to have been the location of the big bang, I have dibs on running the first snack bar and gift shop.

– Where did the big bang come from?

Rosenberg favors one of the leading theories:

The best current theory suggests that our universe is just one universe in a “multiverse” – a vast number of universes, each bubbling up randomly out of the foam on the surface of the multiverse, like so many bubbles in the bathwater, each one the result of some totally random event.

Of course, I have no idea whether the multiverse theory is correct, but it doesn’t seem right to assume that whatever happens in the multiverse is totally random. Most physicists believe that events at the quantum level in our universe are random, but others think that there might be non-random causes underlying the quantum level. Even if quantum events in our universe are random, why assume randomness to be the rule in other universes or in the larger multiverse? Maybe randomness or apparent randomness is simply a feature of the universe we live in.

Rosenberg is certain that everything that happens at the quantum level in our universe, everything that happened in the pre-big bang universe, everything that happened before that in the multiverse, and even everything that is happening in the multiverse right now is fundamentally random. But this seems like conjecture on his part, especially since nobody knows what physical laws were in effect before the big bang or are in effect in the multiverse (if such a thing even exists). 

– Why is there something rather than nothing?

Some philosophers, scientists and theologians consider this to be the deepest question of all. According to Rosenberg, the answer is:

No reason at all. It’s just another quantum event. What science and scientism tell those who hanker for more is “Get over it!”

If Rosenberg is simply telling us what today’s best science has to say about the origin of all existence, he’s probably right. Either there has always been something (there never was a first cause or a prime mover) or one day something simply happened to pop into existence. Rosenberg’s project, however, is both to explain what science tells us and to convince us that scientism provides the answers we need to live without illusions (“the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything” and “science provides all the significant truths about reality”). I think it would be more rational to confess that we don’t know and may never know why there is something rather than nothing. Science might be the most reliable way to secure knowledge, but it hasn’t given us knowledge of everything.

– What is the purpose of the universe?

As should be expected by now, Rosenberg’s answer is short and to the point. There isn’t any purpose to the universe at all. He points out that physicists have been tremendously successful at explaining natural phenomena without resorting to purposes (what philosophers call “teleological” explanations). Smoke doesn’t rise because its purpose is to get higher. Rosenberg is sure that the universe wasn’t created as someone’s science experiment and we aren’t all living in some kind of enormous virtual reality contraption. He’s probably right, but it seems to me that he’s going beyond science here. The best that can be said in support of his position is that, according to the best science we have, the universe functions without purpose. Contemporary physicists don’t need to invoke purpose or purposes to explain what happens in the universe. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that future physicists will need to invoke purpose to explain why there is a universe, assuming that they are ever able to come up with an explanation at all.

– Why does the universe have the laws of nature and the physical parameters that make intelligent life possible?

It’s often pointed out that if the laws of nature or the basic physical parameters (like the charge on an electron) were slightly different, the stuff we’re made of couldn’t exist, so neither would we. Physicists have come up with different explanations for this fact of life (the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin offered a theory called “cosmological natural selection” in his book The Life of the Cosmos). Of course, some thinkers have concluded that God must have designed things this way to make a nice home for people like you and me. Having accepted the multiverse theory as the best theory we have, however, Rosenberg concludes that we’re just lucky. Given that a multitude of universes have arisen from the multiverse, it stands to reason that some of them are like ours. We won the cosmic lottery. 

Maybe he’s right (although some days I don’t feel like a winner). Personally, I’m reserving judgment.

Coming up in part 8: “How Physics Fakes Design”.