Category Archives: Science

A Guide to Reality, Part 2

Posted on by

A couple days ago, I stated my intention (you might even say I promised) to work through Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without IIlusions right here at WOCS. That was in part 1. Believe it or not, this is part 2.

In his preface, Professor Rosenberg explains that he wrote the book for people who are ready to face reality. By that he means people who believe there is no God (atheists) or have serious doubts (agnostics) and who want to know what science has to say about a few perennial questions that keep some of us awake at night. He thinks the scientific view of reality has certain consequences:

The book is about those consequences. It provides an uncompromising, hard-boiled, no-nonsense, unsentimental view of the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the meaning of life, the trajectory of human history, morality and mortality, the will, the mind and the self (ix).

Rosenberg scoffs at attempts to reconcile science and religion. He holds that “an unblinking scientific worldview requires atheism” (viii), which explains why most of America’s leading scientists are atheists and those who aren’t atheists are mostly agnostics.

I don’t think it makes any difference to Rosenberg whether science leads us to atheism or atheism leads us to science. He started out in physics, ended up in philosophy, branched out to biology and economics, and somewhere along the way became an atheist. But someone might proceed in the other direction: doubting God’s existence and then looking to science to explain why the world is the way it is. His contention is that science and atheism are compatible, while science and religion (or theism) aren’t.

In my opinion, however, he exaggerates the conflict. You don’t have to deny God’s existence in order to be an excellent scientist. Instead, what you need to do is put thoughts of God aside when you’re doing science. Science is the search for natural explanations, not supernatural ones. Invoking God as the explanation for the existence of the human eye, for example, amounts to throwing up your hands and choosing a different subject. If you want to speculate about some god or other creating the universe and initializing the fundamental constants (like the mass of an electron) to values supportive of life, you’re not doing science. In this methodological sense, a scientist has to be an atheist.

But despite what Rosenberg says, nobody knows why or how the universe came into existence; or if it’s always existed in some form or other; or whether our universe is one of many. Even if scientists eventually figure out the answers to those questions, we’ll never be able to rule out the possibility that some creator or creative force beyond our universe got the cosmic ball rolling. Nor will we ever be able to prove that God, Zeus or Santa Claus isn’t watching right now to see if we’ve been naughty or nice. What evidence could there be to prove that kind of negative?

What we can say is that, historically speaking, science has shown a vast number of previously mysterious phenomena to be natural processes. There is no reason to think we need an entity outside space and time to explain why there are stars and galaxies, or why there are birds and bees, or why the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth. As fewer phenomena have seemed to require a supernatural explanation, it has seemed less and less likely that there is Anyone Up There. As we’ve learned more about our world, ancient stories have become much less plausible. So far as science is concerned, God is a dead letter.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean God is dead, however implausible that he, she, it or they either are or ever were “alive”.

Next time: stories and scientism.

A Guide to Reality, Part 1

Posted on by

Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University. He’s published more than 100 articles and reviews. Among his books are Microeconomic Laws: A Philosophical Analysis, Hume and the Problem of Causation, The Structure of Biological Science and Darwinian Reductionism. Like most philosophers these days, he writes for an academic audience. In 2011, however, he published a book for a general audience: The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions.

The title is a little misleading, since Rosenberg derives his atheism from a more fundamental belief called “scientism”. That’s the view according to which, in Rosenberg’s words, “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything”. Unfortunately, there is no word for a person who accepts scientism other than “scientist” and you can be a scientist without believing in scientism. For that matter, you can be an atheist without believing in scientism. 

On the other hand, if you’re sure of God’s existence, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality probably won’t change your mind. It’s a book for people who are willing to take science extremely seriously, even to the point of concluding that many of humanity’s most common beliefs are wrong. Since I’m one of those people, I enjoyed the book, even while disagreeing with some of Rosenberg’s conclusions.

Because The Atheist’s Guide is well-written and covers so much ground (for example, physics, evolution, perception, consciousness, free will, history and morality), I thought it would be an interesting exercise to work through it, explaining and responding to Professor Rosenberg’s views right here on this blog (while continuing to write about other things, like class warfare and mowing the lawn). 

If you want to consider the professor’s views first-hand and be able to correct my account of what he has to say (assuming you want to participate), the paperback and electronic versions are going for less than $15 online.

9780393344110_p0_v1_s260x420

Next time:  the relationship between science and atheism.

Some of This News Is Related (and We’re All Another Day Older)

Posted on by

The Wayne County (Michigan) prosecutor has charged 54-year old Theodore Wafer of Dearborn Heights with second-degree murder, manslaughter and illegal possession of a firearm. He shot Renisha McBride in the face after she crashed her car on his street at 2 a.m. and came to his house, apparently looking for help.

At least one semi-facetious observer recently suggested a link between this kind of thing and the end of the world as we know it. On a related topic – what we’re doing to the planet – a leaked report from a U.N. commission predicts that climate change will reduce the global food supply in coming years, while the world’s population grows (albeit at a declining rate) and the demand for food increases.

An ex-soldier writing in the New York Times accepts the idea that we’ve entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, a concept some scientists have adopted in order to reflect the massive effects we’re having on the planet. The ex-soldier argues that we should think of our civilization as already being dead, just like he used to think of himself as already dead when he was stationed in Iraq. Maybe he’s right and a more fatalistic attitude toward the effects of climate change would make us behave differently. We might go calmly about our business and make lots of necessary changes. On the other hand, we might do even less than we’re doing now.

There is also quite a big difference between one particular soldier dealing with the next few hours of his life and 200 nations composed of 7 billion people doing something about the next 100 years. Global climate change is, after all, a perfect example of “the problem of the commons”, i.e. “the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group’s long-term best interests” (Wikipedia). An economist writing in the American Economic Review admits that:

as the US and other economies have grown, the carrying capacity of the planet—in regard to both natural resources and environmental quality—has become a greater concern….While small communities frequently provide modes of oversight and methods for policing their citizens…, commons problems have spread across communities and even across nations. In some of these cases, no overarching authority can offer complete control, rendering common problems more severe.

Yet he concludes that “economics is well-positioned to offer better understanding and better policies to address these ongoing challenges” (maybe he felt the need for an upbeat ending).

Still, the U.N. Climate Change Conference is underway in Warsaw. There are people advocating for a steady-state economy in which population growth and the use of natural resources are limited. A group of eminent scientists recently said that the “evidence indicating that our civilisation has already caused significant global warming is overwhelming”, but it’s still possible to limit the increase to a sustainable 2 degrees Centigrade if we act quickly. 

Meanwhile, China has just decided to remove its restriction on city-dwellers having more than one child, which will mean another million or two young Chinese every year, and Japan is substantially cutting its greenhouse gas reduction target in order to compensate for shutting down its nuclear power plants.

In other news, Andy Kaufman is, unfortunately, still dead.

Cosmic Justice

Posted on by

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?).  

——————————————————————————————————————–

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

Posted on by

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.

——————————————————————————————————————–

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: