Chapter 5: The Elusive Mind of God
If an alien came, knowing our entire context, decide whether God is the First Cause of our universe? As we have seen, all three candidates (God, Mathematical and Logical Consistency, and the Universe) are unprovable and unfalsifiable. But, is there something more than the negative argument that God can’t be disproved?
Gödel: truth goes beyond provability.
The possibility that there is a God may not be provable through science. It is an act of faith to believe in any of the First Cause candidates and declare that that really is the First Cause.
Nobel physicist Leon Ledermann: “When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up.”
Can we believe in God and at the same time believe in science, and that not being a double-think or other intellectual dishonesty? If there is a conflict, where is it?
God as the Embodiment of the Laws of Physics
Many think of God as the anthropomoriphization of the laws of physics. Can God be accessible only through physics? If you believe in this there is no contradiction in believing in God as the embodiment of the laws of physics and a belief in science.
A Presence Behind the Process
If one does not see God as “the embodiment of the laws of physics” but the source of it, it means that God is behind and beyond the laws.
Einstein (Rationality) had a profound reverence for “the rationality made manifest in existence”, and that this reason is inaccessible to man.”
Hawiking (Mind of God): The laws of physics are the embodiment of a more fundamental “rationality” (we can call it God). “Reason” is beyond our reach, but the laws of physics are not.
This doesn’t mean that God had any purpose in creation or that continues to be involved. All it suggest is that there is (or once was) God and its existence resulted in the universe. This also doesn’t create a contradiction with science. It answers, Who done it?, but not Why?
The Leap of Purpose: The God Who Wishes to Drink Tea
Does attributing a motive to God contradict evidence we find in science?
“The universe can’t be shown to be only the sum of the physical processes involved, no matter how well these processes explain all physical phenomena.”
We aren’t forced to choose between the physical explanation and the explanation in terms of purpose.
The Watchmaker
Is evolution a killer of an obstacle for belief that God could have had the intention of creating us?
What would be the problem with believing that evolution is a process which God invented, has used, and continues to use to achieve his ends?
Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)
- “Argument from design” (along with William Paley) and the theory of evolution.
- “His argument is that the theory and evidence of evolution show us that the universe is a universe which could not possibly have a designer.”
- Although the factors of environments seem to be infinite and therefore very improbable to generate humans, the odds can be improved considerably without introducing God.
- Nobody had to plan, predict, or foretell such things as the human eye.
- “Even at their worst the statistical odds of the ingredients and the process arising spontaneously in the universe are good enough to explain their arising, without having to posit an inventor or an instigator.”
- Regarding the stand-off, we can as well say that DNA just is.
- Regarding the simplicity argument, since the world is so complex something more complex must have created that, therefore God is much more complex, and so on and on.
William Paley
- “the complexity of the living world”
- If you found a watch, you would conclude that it had a maker who comprehended its construction and designed its use. This can be seen in nature, although a lot more complex.
- Existence of a Creator God
“The magnitude of the problems involved with trying to set up the environment in a particular way to favour one sort of mutation is almost beyond comprehension.” Is God able to manipulate the environment like that?
The laws of physics play a very important role in the process of evolution.
2nd question: Has there been enough time for this process to produce something as complex as the human eye?
Where did the process of evolution come from? Did it require an inventor?
Why we ask if there is a God? We have the capacity of being somehow self-aware. Why? Simon Conway Morris concluded that the evolution of human intelligence was close to inevitable.
Barrow: “There may be an undiscovered organizing principle dictating the evolution of complex systems.” We might believe it is God. There is also the other part that says that because the environments and evolution is so complex, then, God have had to do some fancy manipulation behind the scenes in order for evolution to work. Nevertheless, we have seen that God is not ruled in nor out.
The Universe as a “Put-Up Job”
“The study of evolution tells us that the natural environment on earth was not necessarily designed with us humans in mind.” Is it a “put-up job”?
The conditions necessary for the universe to be created (the electric charge and the mass of the electron, the strength of the gravitational force) must had been too precise. “If the force of gravity had differed from equality by more that 1 in 10-60 at a time less than 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe either long ago would have collapsed again a Big Crunch, or else there would have been such run-away inflation that gravity wouldn’t have been able to pull any matter together to form stars.”
Is the universe a great conspiracy to make intelligent life possible?
Second Gordian Knot: The Anthropic Principle
The anthropic principle
- We find the universe to be as it is because we exist (if the universe were different we wouldn’t be here to notice it).
- Weak: the conditions are just right for us to be here.
- Strong: there is a universe because we exist.
Hacking at the Second Gordian Knot
Two reasons why many don’t like the anthropic principle
1. It’s a kind of thinking that sets us going in circles and arriving nowhere.
2. Hawking: “It would be a negation of all of our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe.”
The Inflationary Universe
With inflation theory we don’t need a specific beginning (time and the forces) to produce the universe we have today. It wipes the differences (i.e. there is a finetuning of these forces).
Alan Guth: “Guth discovered a process which, at a time less that 10-30 seconds after the Big Bang, could have caused gravity to become a huge repulsive force… it would have accelerated the expansion, causing violent, runaway inflation in the dimensions of the universe. Inflation theorists think any imbalance between the expansive energy and the force of gravity would have been wiped out by this period of runaway inflation.”
“What we are able to observe is only a small fraction of all there is.” Example of the balloon with the red spots and an inflating machine.
It is almost inevitable that one of these “spots” have had the fine-tuning (conditions) for us to be here.
Can we ever claim we understand it all? Can we have a Theory of Everything?
- Example of extrapolating the geography of Earth from a small point in Boston or any other place. The don’t know the extension of the universe or the multiuniverses, they are out of our reach, so it would be silly and pretentious to believe we can do such thing.
- “No matter how clever our theories, we are likely to be prisoners of an extremely limited point of view – flatearthers of the worst sort.”
Vacuum is not “empty space”, but a continuous fluctuation of energy, moving between the positive and negative sides of the zero.
Theory of Relativity: the presence of matter of energy causes spacetime to curve, or warp. The more matter/energy, the greater the curving. If at the beginning there was nothing (vacuum), how can a universe like ours was formed? This theory only tells us that it could have curl the universe to the size of a ball, or expanded so much that galaxies wouldn’t have formed. Why the cosmological constant is near zero when this theory says it should be enormous?
Wormholes help with this puzzle. Baby universes can inherit the cosmological constant value from one of the other universes through a wormhole attachment.
“All we can conclude is that, if these theories are right, the reason why these constants of nature are knowable only by observation is that they arise from a situation in which some randomness plays a part – leaving us at best calculating probabilities, not with exact predictions.”
Not the Ether Again!
Ether: invisible medium which was once thought to pervade all space. Einstein demolished it by stating the vacuum state.
Now it’s thought to be the Higgs field. “By understanding how the Higgs field interacts with certain particles they may be able to derive the values of some particle masses which up to now have been part of the unexplained fine-tuning of nature.”
How can we solve the mystery of why some of these relationships should appear to be tuned to allow for our existence?
Discussion about purpose and design (a belief that God created us and had a purpose doing it). Is there a conflict between this belief and modern science?
- Process of evolution (It can work both ways, it does not rule out God. What if God created the process of evolution?)
- “Argument from design” (not a compelling argument for the existence of God)
- If God only needed to invent the laws of statistics and these are dictated by mathematical consistency, the latter could be the First Cause (back to our previous stand-off).
- The anthropic principle is unsatisfactory (role of God in the fine-tuning).
- “So far we find nothing profoundly inconsistent between belief in the God with a purpose and what we learn from science. Different interpretations and speculations are possible, but we must admit, whichever interpretation is ours, that we cannot prove that the other interpretation is wrong.”
The Longing of Johannes Kepler
Hawking has said, “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.”
“We can’t accept Hawking’s or the psalmist’s quibbles on these grounds as scientific evidence for the lack of a God who is aware of us.”
Kepler thought that God is within us, that we are part of God. “It is undeniably a tremendous leap form belief in the hands-off God to belief in a God who makes himself an active part of our universe – not just a part of our universe in a general way through the implacable and eternal laws of physics, but a part of myself.”
“There is a widespread assumption that belief in a God who intervenes in the universe by using human beings as his intermediaries would be difficult, even impossible, to save if science were able to explain consciousness, self-awareness, intellect, personality, emotion, intuition, aesthetics, inspiration, and belief, in terms of physical and biological processes, perhaps by demonstrating that our brains and nervous systems are super-complex computers, their hardware and programming the product of evolution.”
- Role of artificial intelligence, Hofstadter, Lucas, formal systems.
- “At present we also have no other choice but to allow a stand-off regarding an explanation for the human mind.”
The Fiddler on the Roof
“The leap to belief in an active, intervening God is a hazardous one, because it makes specific predictions about events we ought to be observing if they happen, it is, of all forms of belief, the most vulnerable and potentially falsifiable.”
Notes of the Dialogue (Ch 5, with Roberto Blum as a guest)
- Principio antrópico
- Multiuniversos (mas de alguno dio las condiciones perfectas para que hubiese vida)
- No hemos visto otros universos porque no están dentro de nuestro cono de espacio/tiempo.
- ¿Cómo es que las matemáticas son tan buenas y aptas, siendo un sistema formal, puedan describir tan bien el universo?
- Los sistemas formales nos pueden llegar a cosas inimaginables (son reglas que seguimos y nos llevan a ese punto). Las matemáticas inician como un isomorfismo de la “realidad”. Los axiomas siendo la suma y la resta y a partir de eso se desarrollan hasta formar teorías que aunque no son observadas si pueden llegar a serlo.
- Las matemáticas son un proceso evolutivo en este sentido.
- ¿Son las matemáticas el lenguaje que utilizamos para comunicarnos con Dios?
- Las matemáticas son tan buenas por su isomorfismo con el universo.
- ¿El universo tiene una mente? ¿Es la mente Dios?
- Un sistema de reglas es solo información, como puede ser nuestra mente. La mente es como un software.