Posted on 03/30/2021 9:04:02 AM PDT by Heartlander
Stephen Meyer founded and heads the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England and is the author of three books that are essential reading in the scientific debate about evolution. The first, Signature in the Cell, examines the role of DNA and the cellular-level evidence for intelligent design. The second, Darwin’s Doubt, shows how the explosive origin of animal life makes a case for intelligent design that even Charles Darwin would have trouble opposing. Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe , was due out on March 30.
What is the God hypothesis? It’s the idea that God exists and theism as a worldview explains some of the key evidence concerning biological and cosmological origins. I’m proposing that hypothesis to explain some of the key discoveries of modern science—the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, and new forms of life on this planet.
Why do you use the word return to describe the God hypothesis? It’s a return because the scientific revolution began roughly in 1300 from a Christian foundation, as more and more scientists thought about nature in Biblical terms. One of the key ideas was that systematic investigation could reveal and help us understand nature. Since we are made in the image of a rational Creator, we could understand the rationality, design, and lawful order God built into nature. Theism provided a framework for doing science, and scientists discovered evidence supporting that framework.
Science moved away from that foundation? During the 19th century that framework dramatically shifted as more and more scientists began to commit themselves to a strictly materialistic approach to science. They became convinced they could explain the origins of the solar system, life, and human beings by reference to purely unguided processes. By the end of the 19th century, the materialistic—or naturalistic—worldview was dominant in Western science. Return of the God Hypothesis is the story of how three great scientific discoveries since the beginning of the 20th century—in physics, biology, and cosmology—have brought back a strong evidential basis for theistic belief.
Let’s start with physics. One of the big discoveries was that the laws of physics, and what are called the “constants” expressed in those fundamental laws, are exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life in the universe. Physicists have discovered matter and energy configured that way from the very beginning of the universe. These parameters could have been very different. They’re not logically necessary. A dozen or more of these fine-tuning parameters have very precise values that allow life to exist. This suggests the need for a fine-tuner.
What’s one example? We need carbon to make the molecules upon which life is based. Fred Hoyle discovered the many fine-tuned parameters necessary to produce it. Hoyle was stunned by the exquisite precision of the fine-tuning. We have this huge abundance of carbon in the universe—much more abundant than we would have expected—and we live in a kind of Goldilocks universe. The laws of physics describe forces that are not too strong, not too weak. The speed of light is not too fast, not too slow. The expansion rate of the universe is not too fast, not too slow. These are astronomically, incredibly improbable.
Let’s move on to biology. There are many layers of evidence of design, but the most foundational evidence is at the molecular level—DNA and RNA molecules, the protein molecules that store information. All living systems require proteins to do lots of important jobs. They build the parts for these exquisite forms of nanotechnologies, little miniature machines that we’re finding in cells: rotary engines, turbines, sliding clamps, all in a miniaturized scale. Those miniature machines are built out of proteins, and the proteins process information. To build the proteins, you need information in the DNA molecule. That information is stored in a digital or alphabetic form.
Francis Crick made an important contribution. In 1957, he put forward the sequence hypothesis: that chemical sub-units along the interior of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or like digital characters in a section of software. These discoveries came in a period known as the molecular biological revolution in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. They raised a huge question: Where does the information come from? Chemical evolutionary theories of the origin of life have not been able to answer that question satisfactorily.
Now to the third area: cosmology. The cosmological evidence reinforces the evidence from physics. It suggests the need for a transcendent cause. We’ve discovered in modern observational astronomy and theoretical physics—two separate branches of science—powerful indicators that the universe itself had a beginning. This began first in observational astronomy as people realized we live in a great big universe with lots of galaxies moving away from us. As you wind the clock backward in your mind’s eye, the universe comes to a beginning of that expansion. It’s like blowing up a balloon, but then letting the air out of the balloon to go backward in time. You get to a place where all that galactic material would have congealed and that would mark the beginning of the expansion of the universe, and arguably the beginning of the universe itself.
Does that go along with the idea of the Big Bang, which lots of Christians dismiss? A lot of Christians misunderstand the Big Bang theory. I have a lot of conversations with people at conferences and churches and so forth, and many Christians think that the scientists are saying that the Big Bang caused the origin of the universe, as if the Big Bang was the first cause. They think the scientists are positing the Big Bang as an alternative to God as the Creator. In fact, the Big Bang is the first effect, the first event. The picture that we have of the origin of the universe from theoretical physics is one where either there was a beginning to time, or time and space both. Either way, this is exactly what you’d expect on a theistic understanding of the universe, and indeed, on a Biblical understanding. The very first words of Genesis are, after all, “In the beginning.”
What did we learn in theoretical physics? Einstein’s great theory of general relativity, his new theory of gravity, and solutions to his field equations implied that the universe had a beginning. There’s been debate about whether or not you can “back extrapolate” all the way to a beginning using Einstein’s theory, but there have been other proofs in theoretical physics of a beginning to the universe.
Critics of intelligent design (ID) have accused the ID movement of secretly pushing creationism. You and your allies have insisted ID is legitimate scientific inquiry that stops short of trying to identify the designer. Now you’re making the case for His identity. Could this book give fuel to your critics? I’m sure it could, but that’s not an evidential objection. That’s an accusation as to motive. It is irrelevant to the merits of the argument itself. The argument we’ve made is that nature points to a designing agent. In biology, we see evidence of design in the digital code that’s present in the DNA molecule. We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information in a digital or alphabetic form—what we call sequence-specific—invariably arises from an intelligent source. If we’re trying to reconstruct what happened in the past, we want to consider what we know about cause-and-effect patterns in the world around us. The same method of reasoning Darwin used has led us to a non-Darwinian conclusion: If there’s a program, then there’s a programmer. Now, I’m looking at a broader range of evidence to answer: “Who is the designer?”
Does this represent a shift for the ID movement, going from defense to offense? The intelligent design movement has been on offense from the beginning. We think we have the best explanation for the origin of information and the irreducible complexity of living systems—a mind of some kind. What I’m doing as a philosopher of science is looking at this deeper question about the identity of the designing intelligence.
This is something new in your quest. In making the original case for design in biology, I left unspecified whether the designing intelligence was a transcendent designer or an immanent designer, a designer within the cosmos or a designer that transcended matter, space, time, and energy, what we call the universe. In this new book, what I’m doing is simply looking at a broader range of evidence to answer a question that’s been posed to me, which is, “What can we say from science about the identity of the designer? Is it more likely to be an alien or a god, and immanent or transcendent?”
And you’re seeing … The designer must have preceded the universe, because the fine-tuning was established at the very beginning of the universe. No immanent intelligence, no space alien designer within the cosmos, can account for the laws of physics upon which its very life depends and which preceded its existence. The fine-tuning problems point to a transcendent design that preexists matter, space, time, and energy.
—J.C. Derrick is the former deputy chief content officer of WORLD
And God said, “Let there be light,” then there was this Big Bang...
Here’s a video I’m sure you will find interesting...
Original tape date: November 8, 1999.
From 1999: Lothar Schafer talks about his book “In Search of Divine Reality.” The tries to make connections among science, religion, and the arts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8veSc3S9_8M
_____________________________________________
On the Foundations of Metaphysics in the
Mind-like Background of Physical Reality
by Lothar Schafer
That the basis of the material world is non-material is a transcription of the fact that the properties of things are determined by quantum waves, - probability amplitudes which carry numerical relations, but are devoid of mass and energy. As a consequence of the wave-like aspects of reality, atoms do not have any shape - a solid outline in space - but the things do, which they form; and the constituents of matter, the elementary particles, are not in the same sense real as the real things that they constitute.
Rather, left to themselves they exist in a world of possibilities, “between the idea of a thing and a real thing”, as Heisenberg wrote, in superpositions of quantum states, in which a definite place in space, for example, is not an intrinsic attribute. That is, when such a particle is not observed it is, in particular, nowhere.
In the quantum phenomena we have discovered that reality is different than we thought.
Visible order and permanence are based on chaos and transitory entities. Mental principles - numerical relations, mathematical forms, principles of symmetry - are the foundations of order in the universe, whose mind-like properties are further established by the fact that changes in information can act, without any direct physical intervention, as causal agents in observable changes in quantum states. Prior to the discovery of these phenomena information-driven reactions were a prerogative of mind. “The universe”, Eddington wrote, “is of the nature of a thought. The stuff of the world is mind-stuff”.
Mind-stuff, in a part of reality behind the mechanistic foreground of the world of space-time energy sensibility, as Sherrington called it, is not restricted to Einstein locality. The existence of non-local physical effects - faster than light phenomena - has now been well established by quantum coherence-type experiments like those related to Bell’s Theorem. If the universe is non-local, something that happens at this moment in its depths may have an instantaneous effect a long distance away, for example right here and right now.
By every molecule in our body we are tuned to the mind-stuff of the universe. In this way the quantum phenomena have forced the opening of a universe that Newton’s mechanism once blinded and closed. Unintended by its creator, Newton’s mechanics defined a machine, without any life or room for human values, the Parmenidian One, forever unchanging and predictable, “eternal matter ruled by eternal laws”, as Sheldrake wrote.
In contrast, the quantum phenomena have revealed that the world of mechanism is just the cortex of a deeper and wider, transcendent, reality. The future of the universe is open, because it is unpredictable. Its present is open, because it is subject to non-local influences that are beyond our control. Cracks have formed in the solidity of the material world from which emanations of a different type of reality seep in. In the diffraction experiments of material particles, a window has opened to the world of Platonic ideas.
That the universe should be mind-like and not communicate with the human mind - the one organ to which it is akin - is not very likely. In fact, one of the most fascinating faculties of the human mind is its ability to be inspired by unknown sources - as though it were sensitive to signals of a mysterious origin. It is at this point that the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
Ever since the discovery of Hume’s paradox - the principles that we use to establish scientific knowledge cannot establish themselves - science has had an illegitimate basis. Hume was right: in every external event we observe conjunction, but infer connection. Thus, causality is not a principle of nature but a habit of the human mind. At the same time, Hume was not right in postulating that there is no single experience of causality. Because, when the self-conscious mind itself is directly involved in a causal link, for example when its associated body takes part in a collision, or when the mind by its own free will is the cause of some action, then there is a direct experience of, and no doubt that, causal connections exist.
When this modification of the paradox is coupled with the quantum base, a large number of pressing problems find their delightful solutions.
Like the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge is counter-intuitive, and not at all like the automatic confidence that we have in sensations of this phenomenon. The basis of knowledge is threefold. The premises are experience of reality, employment of reason, and reliance on certain non-rational, non-empirical principles, such as the Assumptions of identity, factuality, permanence, Causality, and induction. Where do these principles come from?
Neither from an experience of external phenomena, nor from a process of reasoning, but from a system program of the self-conscious mind. By being an extension of the mind-like background of nature and partaking of its order, mind gives the epistemic principles - those used in deriving knowledge - certainty. Since they are not anchored in the world of space-time and mass-energy but are valid nevertheless, they seem to derive from a higher order and transcendent part of physical reality. They are, it can be assumed, messengers of the mind-like order of reality.”
It has already been decoded:
D-R-I-N-K Y-O-U-R O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E.
What we are only now realizing is that there are “scientific mysteries” hidden in the Tanach that point to, or mark out, two significant new theoretical works in mathematics and in physics. The mathematical theory, George Spencer-Brown’s “The Laws of Form”, describes how to construct all the fundamental building blocks of mathematics, number theory, and computer science. The physical theory, Burkard Heim’s “Extended Quantum Field Theory” describes the fundamental structure of matter and energy in the Universe and how it came to be, i.e. cosmology. Recently, in 2016, Heim associates Walter Dröscher and Jochem H. Hauser published “Introduction to Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology of Gravity-Like Fields” which ties Heim’s to the “Standard Model” of the Universe. In this book, they point out the bridge between mathematics and physics: the equivalence of information and energy first proposed by Leó Szilárd in 1929.
Both theories were published in the last half of the twentieth century. Both have not been “accepted” by “main-stream” scientists because neither was the product of the conventional scientific establishment. That is the way it has always been with the advancement of science. The thing that makes these theories special is that there is a document which has been in existence and unchanged longer than any other document that has passages that point to each and virtually scream “YES! This is how I did it!”
We will show that in a more mathematical sense, the Holy Scriptures can be thought of as a holographic projection (aka hologram) of the CotU’s plan for the form and evolution (in the sense of structured change over time) of His creation from the beginning to a definite end point. As we will show, it is a hologram because what one sees in the Bible depends on how you look at it. Just as an optical hologram can store many images depending on the frequency and orientation of the light used to view it, the Bible will tell you different things depending on how you read it. If you read every word in order you get the basic story. If you read every other word in order you get another story.
What is written in the Bible about future events is called “Bible Prophecy” but it does not come true, solely, because the CotU knows what is going to happen. “Bible Prophecy” comes true because it is a mapping from the actual plan (aka The Word) that makes things happen in the universe that we experience.
https://www.scribd.com/document/470732777/Unified-Theory-of-Everything
Sheldon’s mom was right!
Bump. Tha KS for the article. Will be incorporating it into my profile page possibly
Stan tenen was the person who first told me about Laws of Form.
I had a feeling you were familiar with their work by what you posted. That’s what made me look up the link.
It had been a while since I looked at their website. It has changed a bit since I last looked, but they have/had some really intriguing work and images on the site, such as taking 3D models of the Hebrew Alphabet and shining a light through them from various angles so you can see the different shapes they project and how they correlate to science, DNA, and various interpretations of scripture etc. Anyway sounds like you are familiar and I couldn’t quickly locate the image I was looking for.
There’s nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.
Fascinating stuff. Very useful.
BTW - it is worth reminding all, that God existed before time, and He (seemingly) has direct access to all points in time, and all places, (and whatever else there is).
More stuff for our pea brains to ponder.
I've always believe in such. How can something appear out of nothingness? My problem and probably the ultimate question is why a transcendent being[s] did such. What was the purpose? Why such an expanding universe? Did they already have the physics designed when they started this grand design? Did they believe or hope that the universe would eventually create a habitat for sentient beings? If so, what was that purpose?
Unless there is conscience after death and we meld with them, I don't believe we will ever understand the how and why, no matter how many equations on a white board.
I gather that you have already looked into the Holy Bible and found it did not have sufficient answers to your questions, correct?
Ever think about giving it another try?
For me, I just couldn't stand not knowing.
Enjoy your beliefs. I wish I had it, but my logic and reasoning won't allow such blind faith. Best to you.
Thanks for an honest reply.
Yes, there's good stuff to live by in the Bible. That's why I follow Judeo/Christian ethics. They work the best for all mankind.
If there is a soul, I believe I have a good one. And if there is a Biblical God in heaven, I shouldn't have to say out loud anything - he should be able to read my heart/soul and have seen the good I've done and forgive my early failures towards humanity.
As you can see, I'm still looking for answers...
“Randomness” is a mere confection of the mind of man. The physical universe works through time, with every event being caused by prior events.
It’s simple, but not easy.
yet that position makes all morality subjective. If someone else says their internal morality says “do whatever you can get away with” there’s no basis for saying they are wrong. Apart from a transcendent creator there can be no objective morality - only personal preference or social convention.
Maybe so, but it works for me and I would guess millions of others. Hope you saw my post that I believe in Judeo/Christian ethics and values. I just don’t need to worship an entity when I know what is right and wrong.
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