Seeing God in the Physics Lab

"I am wisdom.... The Lord acquired me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old." (Proverbs 8:12, 22).

The bit [of information] has given rise to the it [of the item]. (J. A. Wheeler)

Imagine I could somehow acquire a cookbook of the physics and chemistry of what was going to be a universe -- all the laws of nature. And I was told that for some bizarre reason during the universe's formation, the self-annihilation of particle/anti-particle pairs that form while energy of the big bang creation condenses into matter would not be total. So therefore some particles of matter would survive that annihilation.

Then, based on those laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe, I could predict that through the alchemy of stellar temperatures and the immense pressures of supernova, the 92 stable elements that would form. I'd know that among those elements would be sodium and chlorine. I could predict that they would chemically react to form sodium chloride, common salt.

All that would be known from first principles -- the reductionist approach to analysis.

But could I predict that in some marvelous combination of the building blocks of matter -- the protons and neutrons and electrons that make up atoms, and then the atoms that combine to form molecules -- that I'd find a mind with its self-consciousness of joy, sentience, awareness of emotions.

Consider: In one mix of protons, neutrons and electrons I get a grain of sand. I take the same protons, neutrons and electrons, put them together in a different mix and get a brain that can record facts, produce emotions, and from which emerges a mind that integrates those facts and emotions -- and experiences that integration as joy.

It's the same protons, neutrons and electrons. They did not get a face-lift, yet one combination seems passive while the other is dynamically alive.

From where does this consciousness arise? Just which proton is feeling the joy or anguishing over the pain as I stub my toe on some unseen object?

It is not evident in the particles that make up the atoms or in the molecules that those atoms combine to form.

Most laypeople are unaware that life started immediately on the once molten earth. The earth formed from the debris of previous supernovae. As that stellar dust was drawn together by the force of gravity into the ball that was to become our planet earth, the friction was so great that the earth melted.

Over time the surface of our planet cooled. The temperature gradually fell to the level at which liquid water could form, and at that time the first forms of life appeared on earth, made from the rocks and water that were once stardust.

There were not billions of years between the formation of the cooled earth and the appearance of life. According to all geological data, life started immediately on earth. How? From where did all the amazing complexly arranged order that goes into even the simplest forms of life arise? The membrane of a cell is an astounding piece of architecture. And the systems that read our DNA genetic code (at 50 operations a second!) to translate that code into the proteins of life boggle the mind.

Yet DNA and those systems arose in the geological blink of an eye. How? What was the source of this information?

There is no clear scientific answer to these questions. Yet all scientists (or essentially all scientists) agree on the data I have just presented. Take five hours and go to a public library. Take a book on human physiology from the shelf. Don't try to study how the body works; that is a lifetime endeavor. Just spend five hours reading about the wonder in the functioning of a single nerve cell. You can weep in joy over the beauty and marvel of the life that is within each of us. And all this wonder occurred in a flash on earth.

We take as givens the forces of gravity, the laws of nature, the ideas that an electron has a negative charge and the protons a positive charge. But these fixed realities do not explain their origins or the order we find in the biological world.

We do not know how energy changes into matter. It took an Einstein to prove that it does, via his equation E=mc2. But the cause that changes matter into energy remains a mystery of nature. As does the cause of gravity. We say there must be gravity waves. We look for virtual photons, those never-seen particles of force and energy, for an explanation.

Eventually a clarification may be found, but even with our eventual understanding of the science behind life, the wonder of life's existence will remain, as will the wonder of existence itself. Why is there a universe, why is there anything rather than nothing?

There is an answer in the Torah for all the wonder, for the source of the order that makes up our world. And that answer lies in the very first word of the Bible, Genesis 1:1:

But there's a problem -- a puzzle in the very first sentence of the Bible! In its literal translation, Bereishit means "in the beginning of." But the Bible has not supplied an object for the preposition "of." Either the reader must fill in that blank by supplying an object for the preposition, or omit the "of" on the assumption that it isn't very important.

If we take the Bible to be the word of God, dropping words is a rather brazen act. Rashi (ca. 1090), the crucial interpreter of the Hebrew words of the Bible, saw the problem and insisted that we seek the deeper meaning. If the verse were "In the beginning," Rashi points out, the Hebrew would have been Be'reshona and not Bereishit.

The solution to this conundrum is found in a 2100-year-old Jerusalem translation of the Hebrew into its sister language, Aramaic. The kabbalist, Nachmanides (ca. 1250), leads into it as follows:

If you will merit and understand the secret of the first word, Bereishit, you will know why the Jerusalem translation [of Genesis 1:1] is 'With wisdom God created the heavens and the earth...' But our knowledge of it is less than a drop in the vast ocean.

The Jerusalem translation is not a discovery by itself. It is based on the information brought by Proverbs a thousand years earlier: "I am wisdom... The Lord acquired me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first [reishit] of His works of old" (Proverbs 8:12, 22). Notice the same word, reishit, appears both in Proverbs and in Genesis 1:1.

Wisdom is the substrate, the basis of existence. The biblical claim is that all existence rests on something as intangible as the word of the Divine. As it says: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made" (Psalms 33: 6).

Substitute the word "information" for "wisdom" and we are into the labs of physics at MIT, Princeton, Stanford, University of Vienna. This is physics, not philosophy, the quantum physics of the 21st century. And it has been the opening word of the Torah for over three millennia.

Suddenly, the source of the complex order that guides every form of life, from bacterium to human, is clear. It is the wisdom of the Divine that forms the foundation of all existence. Our universe, and we ourselves, are built by the word of God. As the Talmud declares: "God looked into the Torah and created the world."

Author Biography:
Gerald Schroeder earned his BSc, MSc and PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of GENESIS AND THE BIG BANG, the discovery of harmony between modern science and the Bible , published by Bantam Doubleday; now in seven languages; and THE SCIENCE OF GOD, published by Free Press of Simon & Schuster, and THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD, also published by Free Press of Simon & Schuster. He teaches at Aish HaTorah College of Jewish Studies.

It's not random at all; rather, it's a very strict, rigorous series of environmental filters.

And that's it? The entire explanation for everything we see in the whole biota?

It seems you confirm that natural selection is the only game in town, and that it operates on species entirely from the outside.

Except for the phenomenon of natural selection, would you say that all of biology is untimately reducible to physics? Do you think that there are physical laws? Do you think they ultimately govern everything, including biological life?

Richard Dawkins tells us that man is not a cause, but an effect, and that life and mind are merely the outcome of genes. Does this explanation satisfy you?

Just some questions. Am trying to get a sense of your world view; for it's quite foreign to me.

Richard Dawkins tells us that man is not a cause, but an effect, and that life and mind are merely the outcome of genes. Does this explanation satisfy you?

I've never read Dawkins, but he makes a valid point. Humans are not outside the system in any kind of real sense, but are integral parts of the universe. We are local and transient, subsystems of the universe with an effective intelligence substantially higher than the background noise, but that doesn't change the fact that we exist at all as a consequence of the machinery of the universe/system doing what it does. There are no unique processes that create a human being. The pattern may be unique, but the process that generates the pattern is not.

The question of whether or not this satifies me is mostly irrelevant (particularly since satisfaction is purely subjective). My satisfaction with a concept is of no importance, and I don't discard concepts that appear to be valid even if I dislike the necessary consequences of them.

In fact, I personally have a strong dissatisfaction with many of the ideas that I nonetheless must believe are valid. I don't have to like it, but I can't change it either. I've had to modify more than one dearly held belief in my life because I was able to prove to myself in a rigorous fashion that its construction was invalid or not fully consistent. On the balance, I greatly dislike the consequences of most of the beliefs I hold these days, and these beliefs have been so thoroughly tested and analyzed that it is relatively improbable that they'll change short of something truly unprecedented happening.

I for one would rather know the ugly truth and optimize my life based on the reality of the situation than accept a belief that is comfortable so that I can be satisfied with life. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is a hollow way to live. Nonetheless, when given the choice between the Red Pill and the Blue Pill, most people will take the Blue Pill every time. It takes a lot of mental, emotional, and psychological stamina to take the Red Pill, and few people do more than dip their toe in the water before discomfort causes them to pull back.

Am trying to get a sense of your world view; for it's quite foreign to me.

A few others have posted some very adequate responses, which I ratify. But your statement above really surprises me. I've never given you anything but the straight, mainstream, scientific view of things. After all this time, how in the world could this be "quite foreign" to you? Have we really been talking past each other to that extent?

Oh, I want to respond to this:
Except for the phenomenon of natural selection, would you say that all of biology is untimately reducible to physics? Do you think that there are physical laws? Do you think they ultimately govern everything, including biological life?

Yes. Yes. And yes.

Having said that, please don't misunderstand. I don't claim that it's impossible for supernatural influences to be involved, either anywhere or everywhere, but I've not seen any truly solid evidence for this, and as you know by now, I'm a "Show me the evidence" kind of guy. Which means I'm open-minded.

And thus anything that cannot be known via science is effectively unknowable? Does science have any limit?

Of course science has limits. Science only "knows" the data that can be verifiably observed, and science can then infer the conclusions that flow from such knowledge. And test those conclusions, etc. Where there is no such data, science is powerless to do any work. There's always pure speculation, but unless it's grounded in reliable data, it's conjecture only. Those things which by their nature are undetectable by our sensory equipment, such as spiritual phenomena, must remain outside the domain of science.

Again, I must add that science doesn't deny the existence of such things. But science -- as a discipline for discovering knowledge -- can't contribute to our understanding of such things.

Thank you for your always terrific posts, betty boop!

betty boop: Richard Dawkins tells us that man is not a cause, but an effect, and that life and mind are merely the outcome of genes. Does this explanation satisfy you?

tortoise: Humans are not outside the system in any kind of real sense, but are integral parts of the universe. We are local and transient, subsystems of the universe with an effective intelligence substantially higher than the background noise, but that doesn't change the fact that we exist at all as a consequence of the machinery of the universe/system doing what it does. There are no unique processes that create a human being. The pattern may be unique, but the process that generates the pattern is not.

I beg to differ with you, tortoise! I believe the answer lies beyond the state-of-the-art of scientific materialism.

It appears your answer presumes four dimensions, one of time, three spatial. But we are searching for higher dimensional evidence - string theory, supersymmetry, etc.

Should a higher dimension include another time dimension as Harvard's Vafa expects (and betty boop instinctively proposed) - the 4D time dimension is a plane, not a line, and thus the cause/effect relationship is moot.

Also, at each higher spatial dimension, the observer man is also the observation - outside the 4D as well as inside of it.

Geometric Physics

IMHO, the potential of geometric physics is profound. It may well have answers for superposition, dark energy, non-locality and other potential superluminal phenomenon.

To sum it up, scientific materialist observations are biased to a selection of 4 coordinates - but "truth" has no such limitation.

It appears your answer presumes four dimensions, one of time, three spatial. But we are searching for higher dimensional evidence - string theory, supersymmetry, etc.

On the contrary, my answer presumed no specific dimensions. If I am not mistaken, Turing machinery is equivalent no matter how many dimensions one assumes a machine to exist in. That is one of the most important concepts of computational theory, that space complexity is preserved no matter how bizarre the system you concoct. Time complexity may vary quite a bit (c.f. quantum computing) but space complexity is invariant.

To sum up (in English this time), if you exist in some arbitrary system, you can exist the same way in all systems. Even if there are higher dimensions (plausible), we will still exist purely inside the system and in the same basic fashion that we exist in whatever model we currently believe to be correct -- causality is not a factor. To put it even more succinctly, the pattern that is "you" is independent of the system it is part of and all systems can contain a perfectly equivalent "you". The system you assume "you" to be in does not alter the properties of "you".

Clear as mud.

And thus anything that cannot be known via science is effectively unknowable? Does science have any limit?

To be pedantic, science can never KNOW anything, in part because science is more of a process than a body of knowledge. Even math is based on axioms, and incidentally you can prove that there are a great many things that are unprovable (within the confines of the above mentioned axioms of mathematics). It is a nasty business.

I can't even be certain that everything is uncertain (though we generally act as though it is, theoretically). I think the idea of pervasive uncertainty being the limit of knowledge bothers a lot of people, and most do not accept it subconsciously because it is very unappealing philosophically.

Clear as mud.

LOLOL! Actually, you are talking my language here, tortoise!

I see your point of a multi-dimensional Turing machine and identity as a subset of system with regard to whatever coordinates of spatial dimension is selected.

However, when you (as a brane) are the dimensional inversion of the system, then the multi-dimensional Turing machine (and every other existent) - is an identity subset of yourself!

The extra time dimension is particular fortuitous in problem solving and I expect the first indication to emerge from research into dark energy. Here’s why:

Gravity is a space/time geometric phenomenon and can be seen as a warping of space/time that causes objects to orbit and spin into the space/time indentation which is higher, positive gravity.

In the space "vacuum" which accounts for 73% of the mass of the universe, gravity (space/time) is negative, causing acceleration and strongly suggesting the inverse --- a space/time outdent.

Constraints on Extra Time Dimensions

When we look at gravity this way, Einstein's desire to transmute the "base wood" of matter into the "pure marble" of geometry becomes accessible!

No, not really PH. For instance, I’ve noticed over the passage of time that you have a great talent for picking your issues. Also you often seem willing to speak through the voice of the “few others” rather than speak for yourself. So, when I directed the following to you –

Richard Dawkins tells us that man is not a cause, but an effect, and that life and mind are merely the outcome of genes. Does this explanation satisfy you?

I was not surprised that you did not answer.

But tortoise weighed in. He said, “I've never read Dawkins, but he makes a valid point.”

At least tortoise is on the record.

I would have welcomed a discussion of the Dawkins statement, but find the opportunity foreclosed.

However, you were responsive on certain other questions. You said:

Yes. Yes. And yes -- to:

(1) Except for the phenomenon of natural selection, all of biology is ultimately reducible to physics. (2) Physical laws exist. (3) Physical laws govern everything, including biological life.

What are physical laws? What is their origin? Did they always obtain throughout the forever between the Big Bang and us? Or did they “evolve” from humble beginnings, to become great and glorious only in our own time? Or are they merely “constructs” of the human creative imagination?

And how do physical laws govern biological life? Physical laws all suggest that equilibrium is the state that all of physical nature at all times tries to achieve along the most efficient time path possible. Translation: Physical equilibrium equals biological death.

So, how does this thing called “life” have a chance against such odds, if all it has going for it is the support of physical laws?

Does Darwin discuss this problem? Does Darwin have anything to say about Life at all?

No biological systems seem to violate any physical laws.

Indeed. It would be rather surprising if they did, Doc.

Still, this is not the same thing as saying that physical laws account for absolutely everything about biological systems.

I raise this objection on simple logical grounds.

The way I see it, all of life has a physical basis. But all of life is more than physical basis. It must be, or it couldn't be "alive."

Great to see you, Doc.

I’ve noticed over the passage of time that you have a great talent for picking your issues. Also you often seem willing to speak through the voice of the “few others” rather than speak for yourself.

I don't like to post just to blab. I try to do it only when I think I have something to add to the discussion. I've never read Dawkins, so I skipped it. Nothing sinister. As for speaking through the voice of others, there was nothing sinister there either. By the time I saw your post, others had already responded. They did well, so I didn't want to duplicate what others had done. For my response, I picked a couple of sentences that were left, which no one had addressed, and where I had something to say. Why is this a problem?

The remainder of your current post has nine questions. Any one of them would be a big topic, so I just can't deal with it all. But I'll take a stab at it:

Physical laws are our way of describing observed relationships in nature. Like the gas laws, or Newton's laws of motion. As far as we know, this is how matter has always behaved. Are they "constructs" of our imagination? Well, as I said, they're descriptions of what we observe. I don't think we're imagining our observations. Our powers of reason allow us to see patterns, relationships, etc., and we can express these relationships in abstract form. That's the best I can do there.

And how do physical laws govern biological life?

DNA involves chemistry. The functioning of a cell involves chemistry. Chemistry is a specialized subset of physics, dealing with how atoms interact with one another to form compounds, etc. Of course life is governed by (or perhaps constrained by) chemistry. We can't do anything that would contradict physical laws.

These may not be the answers you're looking for; but they're the best I can do. I've always attempted to give you straight answers. Please don't look for hidden motives where there are none.

I hope you don’t mind if I step in here (or step in this) and put that ‘skeptic hat’ on…

Keeping in context with the ‘origin’ of the thread, I’d throw the anthropic principle onto the table.

The universe appears to be designed for life.
- (Place name of agnostic physicist’ here.)

Explanations:
1. It was designed.
2. Multi-verse.
3. It just happened and we are lucky.
4. We don’t know yet.

It is a fact that we are here and able to ponder this… It’s not about finding a watch on the beach though – it’s about finding ‘yourself’ on the beach and pondering life, the universe and everything. (Please feel free to insert a ‘catch phrase’ bumper sticker or Douglas Adams saying here) A watch tells time and not where ‘I’ came from or anything about “Me” and ‘I’ know a watch is designed

I believe we can all put the ‘communal skeptic hat’ on at this point.

I know you realize the design theory has been the constant in science in this regard until recently. As a ‘skeptic’ I am asking “for the evidence” that I am the result of a mindless happenstance from the beginning.

As a ‘skeptic’ I am asking “for the evidence” that I am the result of a mindless happenstance from the beginning.

From my viewpoint, you're asking the wrong question. Specifically, you're asking for proof of a negative -- that a universal mind (call it what you will) does not exist. I have no such evidence. No one does.

It's true that the universe is congenial to life. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. That may -- or may not -- be taken to mean that the universe was intentionally designed for life. It seems to me that we've all beat this to death in the crevo threads. There are natural explanations, there are super-natural explanations. For many people it's a matter of personal preference. For me, I'd rather to hold the miracle "explanation" in reserve, in case nature doesn't provide a simpler solution.

I don't think there's a "correct" answer, but to do science, if that is one's choice, one must explore nature. The supernatural can't be explored scientifically. So we do what we can do.

What can we do?

It is a valid question for modern science and personally I don’t think it is asked enough. It is not proving a negative as science is attempting to prove this now.

Again:
As a ‘skeptic’ I am asking “for the evidence” that I am the result of a mindless happenstance from the beginning.

I am asking for the ‘purely natural’ evidence. It is a honest question for someone that holds to ‘purely natural’ explanations.

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