Posted on 03/07/2008 4:40:38 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Since writing my book "Irreligion" and some of my recent Who's Counting columns, I've received a large number of e-mails from subscribers to creation science (who have recently christened themselves intelligent design theorists). Some of the notes have been polite, some vituperative, but almost all question "how order and complexity can arise out of nothing."
Since they can imagine no way for this to happen, they conclude there must be an intelligent designer, a God. (They leave aside the prior question of how He arose.)
My canned answer to them about biological order talks a bit about evolution, but they often dismiss that source of order for religious reasons or because of a misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics.
(See Complexity and Intelligent Design for my Who's Counting discussion of biological and economic order and complexity arising out of very simple programs.)
Because the seemingly inexplicable arising of order seems to be so critical to so many, however, I've decided to list here a few other sources for naturally occurring order in physics, math, and biology. Of course, order, complexity, entropy, randomness and related notions are clearly and utterly impossible to describe and disentangle in a column like this, but the examples below from "Irreligion" hint at some of the abstract ideas relevant to the arising of what has been called "order for free."
Necessarily Some Order
Let me begin by noting that even about the seemingly completely disordered, we can always say something. No universe could be completely random at all levels of analysis.
In physics, this idea is illustrated by the kinetic theory of gases. There an assumption of disorder on one formal level of analysis, the random movement of gas molecules, leads to a kind of order on a higher level, the relations among variables such as temperature, pressure and volume known as the gas laws. The law-like relations follow from the lower-level randomness and a few other minimal assumptions. (This bit of physics does not mean that life has evolved simply by chance, a common mischaracterization of evolution.)
In addition to the various laws of large numbers studied in statistics, a notion that manifests a different aspect of this idea is statistician Persi Diaconis' remark that if you look at a big enough population long enough, then "almost any damn thing will happen."
Ramsey Order
A more profound version of this line of thought can be traced back to British mathematician Frank Ramsey, who proved a strange theorem. It stated that if you have a sufficiently large set of geometric points and every pair of them is connected by either a red line or a green line (but not by both), then no matter how you color the lines, there will always be a large subset of the original set with a special property. Either every pair of the subset's members will be connected by a red line or every pair of the subset's members will be connected by a green line.
If, for example, you want to be certain of having at least three points all connected by red lines or at least three points all connected by green lines, you will need at least six points. (The answer is not as obvious as it may seem, but the proof isn't difficult.)
For you to be certain that you will have four points, every pair of which is connected by a red line, or four points, every pair of which is connected by a green line, you will need 18 points, and for you to be certain that there will be five points with this property, you will need -- it's not known exactly - between 43 and 55. With enough points, you will inevitably find unicolored islands of order as big as you want, no matter how you color the lines.
A whole mathematical subdiscipline has grown up devoted to proving theorems of this same general form: How big does a set have to be so that there will always be some subset of a given size that it will constitute an island of order of some sort?
Ramsey-type theorems may even be part of the explanation (along, of course, with Diaconis' dictum) for some of the equidistant letter sequences that constitute the bible codes. Any sufficiently long sequence of symbols, especially one written in the restricted vocabulary of ancient Hebrew, is going to contain subsequences that appear meaningful.
Self-Organization and Order
Finally, of more direct relevance to evolution and the origin of living complexity is the work of Stuart Kauffman. In his book, "At Home in the Universe," he discusses what he has termed the aforementioned notion of "order for free."
Motivated by the idea of hundreds of genes in a genome turning on and off other genes and the order and pattern that nevertheless exist, Kauffman asks us to consider a large collection of 10,000 light bulbs, each bulb having inputs from two other bulbs in the collection.
Assume that you connect these bulbs at random, that a clock ticks off one-second intervals, and that at each tick each bulb either goes on or off according to some arbitrarily selected rule. For some bulbs, the rule might be to go off at any instant unless both inputs are on the previous instant. For others it might be to go on at any instant if at least one of the inputs is off the previous instant. Given the random connections and random assignment of rules, it would be natural to expect the collection of bulbs to flicker chaotically with no apparent pattern.
What happens, however, is that very soon one observes order for free, more or less stable cycles of light configurations, different ones for different initial conditions. Kauffman proposes that some phenomenon of this sort supplements or accentuates the effects of natural selection.
Although there is certainly no need for yet another argument against the seemingly ineradicable silliness of "creation science," these light bulb experiments and the unexpected order that occurs so naturally in them do seem to provide one.
In any case, order for free and apparent complexity greater than we might naively expect are no basis for believing in God as traditionally defined. Of course, we can always redefine God to be an inevitable island of order or some sort of emergent mathematical entity. If we do that, the above considerations can be taken as indicating that such a pattern will necessarily exist, but that's hardly what people mean by God.
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John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of the best-sellers "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper," as well as of the just-released "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why The Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up " His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month.
Well, I’m a Christian and a creationist and believe that God did it, but it never stopped me, nor many of the other Christian/creationists I know, from going on and getting degrees in science, up as far as PhD’s in several cases.
Hurricane development and tracking IS important to study if for no other reason than to spare lives and property from destruction. How irresponsible would that be to not use the knowledge God gave us to save lives? And that can be said for almost any other field in science.
Me either. In fact the light bulb experiment is a bogus red herring. Take those 10,000 light bulbs and assign an instrument and note to each one (for example "Trumpet - C sharp.") Set those lights blinking and they will never play Beethoven's 5th Symphony, even in a trillion years. Nor Mozart, probably not even a 3 part version of Mary had a little Lamb.
And how, exactly, does that fit in with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? What's it doing being a law if everything runs in violation of it?
There is nothing random about evolution. Probability is not part of the process. Nothing in the universe is stochastic.
I've wondered this myself.
If all the evidence we can evaluate indicates that the universe is no older than about 13.5 billion years, what was He doing before then, or how did He become God at that time?
The only answer to that I've ever heard is that science is wrong and the universe has always existed. There's zero evidence of that, and 100% of the evidence to the contrary.
Plus I hear that the world is only 6,000 years old.
It is bit contradictory.
We won’t be using science to prove something about the natural world or God now, will we? They have nothing to do with each other, as many have noted even on this website.
My two decades of working in the biological sciences, and the difficulty I witnessed in the resolution of opposing scientific viewpoints in face-to-face situations, tells me the anonymity of FR and the wide range of life experiences and education of Freepers will disallow any real focusing. The origin of life is an extremely interesting subject but one which I refer to as a "campfire subject." I feel humankind will still be wrestling with this issue when the sun sets on the last human.
The question is ancient. That it is still a question means that we don’t live long enough to figure these things out and we will have to go with what we were told when we were seven years old, give or take.
I’m not sure why you even bother. I’m surprised you don’t suffocate from inhaling the “smug” that some of these guys emit.
'Creation Science' and Intelligent Design are NOT the same thing, no matter how much folks who want to villify ID try to lump them together.
Quite right. The same topics, the same answers crop up over and over on this website. Once in a while a fresh idea is introduced, but it is soon forgotten like it never happened. So we’re still citing the Second Law of Thermo or a paraphrase that isn’t really the Second Law after all.
How about there is a God but he doesn’t like people hedging their bets like Pschal
My take is that if a question has no answer, especially if it's been asked, studied, and thought about for generations, maybe there is a faulty assumption in the question.
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Um, at one time it was science that stated that the universe always existed, not creationists. Scripture clearly states that it had a beginning and I have never heard any creationist say that it always existed.
When the steady state theory was in it's heyday, the only ones who believed that were those *stupid* creationists who believed the Bible. There was no *scientific* evidence to support that the universe had a beginning. It was taken as a matter of faith based on religious, non-scientific teachings. And guess who was proved right n the long run?
So, until Hubble came along with his observations, it was science that was wrong when it stated that the universe always existed.
right on the button
Mathematician Ping!
It does get pretty strong sometimes.
I take a sinful pleasure in pointing out the intellectual deficiencies of atheists.
You say:
“The easiest answer to all this mess: most people desperately want there to be a higher intellegence (mostly because they want to survive death)”
...which shows that you haven’t reached the next step along that line of thinking: atheists make their conclusion about divine existence in order to avoid the appearance, whether to themselves or to others, of being afraid of death. (And afraid of death they remain in the end, so it’s nothing but a waste of time for them.)
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