God, Man and Physics

The God Hypothesis:
Discovering Design in our "Just Right" Goldilocks Universe
by Michael A. Corey
(Rowman & Littlefield, 256 pp., $27)

GOD'S EXISTENCE is not required by the premises of quantum mechanics or general relativity, the great theories of twentieth-century physics --but then again, it is not contravened by their conclusions either. What else can we do but watch and wait?

The agnostic straddle. It is hardly a posture calculated to set the blood racing. In the early 1970s Jacques Monod and Steven Weinberg thus declared themselves in favor of atheism, each man eager to communicate his discovery that the universe is without plan or purpose. Any number of philosophers have embraced their platform, often clambering onto it by brute force. Were God to exist, Thomas Nagel remarked, he would not only be surprised, but disappointed.

A great many ordinary men and women have found both atheism and agnosticism dispiriting--evidence, perhaps, of their remarkable capacity for intellectual ingratitude. The fact remains that the intellectual's pendulum has swung along rather a tight little arc for much of the twentieth century: atheism, the agnostic straddle, atheism, the agnostic straddle.

The revival of natural theology in the past twenty-five years has enabled that pendulum to achieve an unexpected amplitude, its tip moving beyond atheism and the agnostic straddle to something like religious awe, if not religious faith.

It has been largely the consolidation of theoretical cosmology that has powered the upward swing. Edwin Hubble's discovery that the universe seemed to be expanding in every direction electrified the community of cosmologists in the late 1920s, and cosmologists were again electrified when it became clear that these facts followed from Einstein's general theory of relativity. Thereafter, their excitement diminished, if only because the idea that the universe was expanding suggested inexorably that it was expanding from an origin of some sort, a big bang, as the astronomer Fred Hoyle sniffed contemptuously.

In 1963 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently noticed the background microwave radiation predicted by Big Bang cosmology; when Robert Dicke confirmed the significance of their observation, competing steady-state theories of creation descended at once into desuetude. And thereafter a speculative story became a credible secular myth.

But if credible, the myth was also incomplete. The universe, cosmologists affirmed, erupted into existence fifteen billion years ago. Details were available, some going back to the first three minutes of creation. Well and good. But the metaphoric assimilation of the Big Bang to the general run of eruptions conveyed an entirely misleading sense of similarity. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius took place in space and time; the Big Bang marks the spot at which time and space taper to a singularity and then vanish altogether.

It follows that the universe came into existence from nothing whatsoever, and for no good reason that anyone could discern, least of all cosmologists. Even the most ardent village atheist became uneasily aware that Big Bang cosmology and the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis shared a family resemblance too obvious profitably to be denied.

Thereafter, natural theology, long thought dead of inanition, began appearing at any number of colloquia in mathematical physics, often welcomed by the same physicists who had recently been heard reading its funeral obsequies aloud. In "The God Hypothesis: Discovering Design in our "Just Right" Goldilocks Universe," Michael A. Corey is concerned to convey their news without worrying overmuch about the details. His message is simple. There is a God, a figure at once omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and necessary. Science has established his existence.

AT THE very heart of revived natural theology are what the physicist Brandon Carter called "anthropic coincidences." Certain structural features of the universe, Carter argued, seemed finally tuned to permit the emergence of life. This is a declaration, to be sure, that suggests far more than it asserts. Structural features? Finely tuned? Permit? When the metaphors are squeezed dry, what more is at issue beyond the observation that life is a contingent affair? This is not a thesis in dispute.

Still, it often happens that commonplace observations, when sharpened, prompt questions that they had long concealed. The laws of physics draw a connection between the nature of certain material objects and their behavior. Falling from a great height, an astrophysicist no less than an airplane accelerates toward the center of the earth. Newton's law of gravitational attraction provides an account of this tendency in terms of mass and distance (or heft and separation). In order to gain traction on the real world, the law requires a fixed constant, a number that remains unchanged as mass and distance vary. Such is Newton's universal gravitational constant.

There are many comparable constants throughout mathematical physics, and they appear to have no very obvious mathematical properties. They are what they are. But if arbitrary, they are also crucial. Were they to vary from the values that they have, this happy universe--such is the claim--would be too small or too large or too gaseous or otherwise too flaccid to sustain life. And these are circumstances that, if true, plainly require an explanation.

Carter was a capable physicist; instead of being chuckled over and dismissed by a handful of specialists, the paper that he wrote in 1974 was widely read, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, Steven Weinberg, Robert Jastrow, and John Gribbin all contributing to the general chatter. Very few physicists took the inferential trail to its conclusion in faith; what is notable is that any of them took the trail at all.

THE ASTRONOMER Fred Hoyle is a case in point, his atheism in the end corrected by his pleased astonishment at his own existence. Living systems are based on carbon, he observed, and carbon is formed within stars by a process of nucleosynthesis. (The theory of nucleosynthesis is, indeed, partly his creation.) Two helium atoms fuse to form a beryllium intermediate, which then fuses again with another helium atom to form carbon. The process is unstable because beryllium intermediates are short-lived.

In 1953 Edwin Salpeter discovered that the resonance between helium and intermediate beryllium atoms, like the relation between an opera singer and the glass she shatters, is precisely tuned to facilitate beryllium production. Hoyle then discovered a second nuclear resonance, this one acting between beryllium and helium, and finely tuned as well.

Without carbon, no life. And without specific nuclear resonance levels, no carbon. And yet there he was, Hoyle affirmed, carbon based to the core. Nature, he said in a remark widely quoted, seems to be "a put-up job."

INFERENCES now have a tendency to go off like a string of firecrackers, some of them wet. Hoyle had himself discovered the scenario that made carbon synthesis possible. He thus assigned to what he called a "Supercalculating Intellect" powers that resembled his own. Mindful, perhaps, of the ancient wisdom that God alone knows who God is, he did not go further. Corey is, on the other hand, quite certain that Hoyle's Supercalculating Intellect is, in fact, a transcendental deity--the Deity, to afford Him a promotion in punctuation.

And Corey is certain, moreover, that he quite knows His motives. The Deity, in setting nuclear resonance levels, undertook his affairs "in order to create carbon based life forms."

Did He indeed? It is by no means obvious. For all we know, the Deity's concern may have lain with the pleasurable intricacies of nucleosynthesis, the emergence of life proving, like so many other things, an inadvertent consequence of his tinkering. For that matter, what sense does it make to invoke the Deity's long term goals, when it is His existence that is at issue? If nothing else, natural theology would seem to be a trickier business than physicists may have imagined.

AS IT HAPPENS, the gravamen of Corey's argument lies less with what the Deity may have had in mind and more with the obstacles He presumably needed to overcome. "The cumulative effect of this fine tuning," Corey argues, "is that, against all the odds, carbon was able to be manufactured in sufficient quantities inside stellar interiors to make our lives possible." That is the heart of the matter: against all the odds. And the obvious question that follows: Just how do we know this?

Corey does not address the question specifically, but he offers an answer nonetheless. It is, in fact, the answer Hoyle provides as well. They both suppose that something like an imaginary lottery (or roulette wheel) governs the distribution of values to the nuclear resonance levels of beryllium or helium. The wheel is spun. And thereafter the right resonance levels appear. The odds now reflect the pattern familiar in any probabilistic process--one specified outcome weighed against all the rest. If nuclear resonance levels are, in fact, unique, their emergence on the scene would have the satisfying aspect of a miracle.

It is a miracle, of course, whose luster is apt to dim considerably if other nuclear resonance levels might have done the job and thus won the lottery. And this is precisely what we do not know. The nuclear resonance levels specified by Hoyle are sufficient for the production of carbon. The evidence is all around us. It is entirely less clear that they are necessary as well. Corey and Hoyle make the argument that they are necessary because, if changed slightly, nucleosynthesis would stop. "Overall, it is safe to say"--Corey is speaking, Hoyle nodding--"that given the utter precision displayed by these nuclear resonances with respect to the synthesis of carbon, not even one of them could have been slightly different without destroying their precious carbon yield." This is true, but inconclusive. Mountain peaks are isolated but not unique. Corey and Hoyle may well be right in their conclusions. It is their argument that does not inspire confidence.

THE TROUBLE is not merely a matter of the logical niceties. Revived natural theology has staked its claims on probability. There is nothing amiss in this. Like the rest of us, physicists calculate the odds when they cannot calculate anything better. The model to which they appeal may be an imaginary lottery, roulette wheel, or even a flipped coin, but imaginary is the governing word. Whatever the model, it corresponds to no plausible physical mechanism. The situation is very different in molecular biology, which is one reason criticism of neo-Darwinism very often has biting power. When biologists speculate on the origins of life, they have in mind a scenario in which various chemicals slosh around randomly in some clearly defined physical medium. What does the sloshing with respect to nuclear resonance?

Or with respect to anything else? Current dogma suggests that many of the constants of mathematical physics were fixed from the first, and so constitute a part of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Corey does not demur; it is a conclusion that he endorses. What then is left of the anthropic claim that the fundamental constants have the value that they do despite "all odds"? In the beginning there was no time, no place, no lottery at all.

MATHEMATICAL physics currently trades in four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces governing the nucleus and radioactive decay. In general relativity and quantum mechanics, it contains two great but incompatible theories. This is clearly an embarrassment of riches. If possible, unification of these forces and theories is desirable. And not only unification, but unification in the form of a complete and consistent theoretical structure.

Such a theory, thoughtful physicists imagine, might serve to show that the anthropic coincidences are an illusion in that they are not coincidences at all. The point is familiar. Egyptian engineers working under the pharaohs knew that the angles of a triangle sum to more or less one hundred and eighty degrees. The number appears as a free parameter in their theories, something given by experience and experiment. The Greeks, on the other hand, could prove what the Egyptians could only calculate. No one would today think to ask why the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle sum to precisely one hundred and eighty degrees. The question is closed because the answer is necessary.

THE GRAND HOPE of modern mathematical physicists is that something similar will happen in modern mathematical physics. The Standard Model of particle physics contains a great many numerical slots that must be filled in by hand. This is never counted as a satisfaction, but a more powerful physical theory might show how those numerical slots are naturally filled, their particular values determined ultimately by the theory's fundamental principles. If this proves so, the anthropic coincidences will lose their power to vex and confound.

Nonetheless, the creation of a complete and consistent physical theory will not put an end to revived natural theology. Questions once asked about the fundamental constants of mathematical physics are bound to reappear as questions about the nature of its laws. The constants of mathematical physics may make possible the existence of life, but the laws of mathematical physics make possible the existence of matter. They have, those laws, an overwhelmingly specific character. Other laws, under which not much exists, are at least imaginable. What explanation can mathematical physics itself provide for the fact that the laws of nature are arranged as they are and that they have the form that they do? It is hardly an unreasonable question.

Steven Weinberg has suggested that a final theory must be logically isolated in the sense that any perturbation of its essential features would destroy the theory's coherence. Logical isolation is by no means a clear concept, and it is one of the ironies of modern mathematical physics that the logical properties of the great physical theories are no less mysterious than the physical properties of the universe they are meant to explain. Let us leave the details to those who cherish them.

The tactic is clear enough. The laws of a final theory determine its parameters; its logical structure determines its laws. No further transcendental inference is required, if only because that final theory explains itself.

This is very elegant. It is also entirely unpersuasive. A theory that is logically isolated is not necessarily a theory that is logically unique. Other theories may be possible, some governing imaginary worlds in which light alone exists, others worlds in which there is nothing whatsoever. The world in which we find ourselves is one in which galaxies wink and matter fills the cup of creation. What brings about the happy circumstance that the laws making this possible are precisely the laws making it real? The old familiar circle.

ALL THIS leaves us where we so often find ourselves. We are confronted with certain open questions. We do not know the answers, but what is worse, we have no clear idea--no idea whatsoever--of how they might be answered. But perhaps that is where we should be left: in the dark, tortured by confusing hints, intimations of immortality, and a sense that, dear God, we really do not yet understand.

----------------------------
David Berlinski is a senior fellow of Discovery Institute and the author of "A Tour of the Calculus" and "The Advent of the Algorithm." His most recent book is Newton's Gift (Free Press).

Well, since you say that it is "trivial", you'll have no problem producing a demonstration of the mathematics for random noise creating a working version of Abode PhotoShop.

Perhaps you just don't get it, but proving the validity does not require giving you an example, only proof of all the pertinent concepts. For example, you could state that it is possible to travel at Mach 10 (which it is in a handful of vehicles), and using your reasoning demand that the only proof of human Mach 10 travel is a video of you personally going Mach 10. It would be stupid and ridiculous for me to deny the fact that it is a trivial engineering exercise to travel at Mach 10 despite the fact that you can't do it personally. I'm using "trivial" to mean mundane in an technical sense (i.e. no special or yet undiscovered magic); I am not using it to imply "cheap and easily accessible".

"I've actually been intentionally ignoring the direction you are taking it because you won't like the results. For example, how do we verify this premised designer? By what process was the design accomplished? What were the physical mechanisms used for speciation by the hypothetical designer?"

I have no problem with scientific results. How do we verify a designer of Life? We look in the lab. Have we physically observed an intelligent designer creating a new variety of Life? Yes, for instance in the case of genetically-modified pig organs for human transplants. What process was used? DNA programming. What physical mechanisms for speciation were used? Gene-splicing.

Is this an actual example of Intelligent Design creating Life, rather than new life self-Evolving? Yes. Can Evolutionary Theory predict it or explain it? No.

Does this mean that Intelligent Design is possible, and therefor Evolution is no longer the "only game in town"? Yes.

No, what you are citing is folklore, not science. Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigogine CONCLUSIVELY proved, back in 1987, that the very highest possible levels of order could NOT self-form in a chaotic system. There is a limit in every system as to the maximum level of order that can form naturally from chaos.

While I don't like to repeat myself, Prigogine actually agrees with everything I've written. I've actually read his papers and you clearly misunderstand what he wrote. I can't sugar coat the fact that you are just plain wrong on this matter.

Folklore is that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a million years will produce the collected works of Shakespeare.

That wasn't folklore, it was a clever pedestrian description of the theorem. Obviously none of those numbers are literally real nor are monkeys typing a particularly good source of randomness.

That's what you're trying to say when you claim that useful software programs can just form on their own in a computer if you leave it on long enough.

Yes, that is what I'm trying to say. Except that "long enough" means tomorrow or next week or your lifetime or something like that to you. Unfortunately, the universe doesn't run on your schedule and many things take a hell of a lot longer than your or my attention span. I can deal with that fact as long as I can prove mathematically that everything works out eventually in a finite amount of time. Note that for any specific case, it is actually quite possible to calculate approximately how long it would take. The result is never "infinity", though in some cases it might as well be for our purposes as human beings (though as history has proven, some "intractable" problems become tractable far quicker than imagined).

Well, since you say that it is "trivial", you'll have no problem producing a demonstration of the mathematics for random noise creating a working version of Abode PhotoShop. - Southack

"Perhaps you just don't get it, but proving the validity does not require giving you an example, only proof of all the pertinent concepts." - tortoise

"The jury is not "out" and this is trivially demonstrable. ALL programs of finite length can be produced in a finite amount of time by stupid automata.
47 posted on 2/28/02 11:16 PM Pacific by tortoise
It is trivial to demonstrate a set of biases that will work, and given the thermodynamic chaos of the universe it is rather obvious that those biases must be occurring regularly.
57 posted on 2/28/02 11:37 PM Pacific by tortoise

"Just show me an example of random noise producing a useful program..." - Southack

Did you have an example? - VaBThang

"It would be trivial to demonstrate, though it would likely take longer than I am willing to donate CPU cycles on my machines to generate a long enough noise stream (it depends on the size of the program that has to be generated to prove it)."
92 posted on 3/2/02 10:45 AM Pacific by tortoise

Face up to science, tortoise. You aren't capable of producing an example, demonstration, or even showing the math for your wild-eyed claims.

You'll have to find some lame excuse to flee this thread without producing said support, even though you claim that such exercises are "trivial".

"I can deal with that fact as long as I can prove mathematically that everything works out eventually in a finite amount of time. Note that for any specific case, it is actually quite possible to calculate approximately how long it would take."

The math does NOT work out in a finite amount of time. Maximum potential order has the maximum potential improbability possible in a chaotic system, per Prigogine.

Does this mean that Intelligent Design is possible, and therefor Evolution is no longer the "only game in town"?

I never said that evolution was the only game in town. Both are valid hypotheses (which I've stated over, and over, and over...). However, the usual ID hypothesis does not use a human designer as a premise. You won't get any traction from this fact unless you are positing that speciation was designed by man (and I am pretty sure that is not what you are saying). Just because we've verified that human designers can cause speciation in no way verifies the existence of non-human designers.

"That wasn't folklore, it was a clever pedestrian description of the theorem. Obviously none of those numbers are literally real nor are monkeys typing a particularly good source of randomness."

No, it's folklore. There was actually a demonstration performed about a dozen years ago in which a thousand or so networked computers each simulated a thousand monkeys banging randomingly on keyboards for a thousand years (I don't think that they had the computing power to go to 1MM in time for print back then), and what they were able to show was that pure English words with correct spelling would occassionally be found in the output, but that the words were never in a grammatically correct sentence structure together for anything over 5 words.

They extrapolated from that demonstration that going for the full one million years the monkeys could never produce even one short detective novel, much less a single work by Shakespeare.

I'll do a Google search and see if I can find that old demonstration. It was rather insightful, and aligned very well with Prigogine's new (at that time) points.

"I never said that evolution was the only game in town. Both are valid hypotheses (which I've stated over, and over, and over...). However, the usual ID hypothesis does not use a human designer as a premise. You won't get any traction from this fact unless you are positing that speciation was designed by man (and I am pretty sure that is not what you are saying). Just because we've verified that human designers can cause speciation in no way verifies the existence of non-human designers."

I'm not making any claims as to the composition of the Intelligent Designer(s). I'm merely showing that the theory is valid and has supporting evidence for it.

If the proof of Intelligent Design means that God exists, so be it, but that's a bit beyond this pedestrian discussion. If the proof of Intelligent Design means that Man did it, then so be it, but again, that's beyond this discussion.

What I will say is that Intelligent Design has been scientifically demonstrated both in the lab and in the wild. Intelligent Design aligns with the current known fossil evidence and explains some species such as the duck-billed platipus for which other theories seem to be missing evidenciary support at the present.

What other theory explains both modern genetic engineering as well as ancient fossil evidence?

Why support a theory that is inferior to that?!

That's what you're trying to say when you claim that useful software programs can just form on their own in a computer if you leave it on long enough. - Southack

"Yes, that is what I'm trying to say." - tortoise

Please click on the link in Post #310 to see why that claim is folklore.

Another way of contemplating the vast impossibility of complex structures forming randomly is to look at a puny 640*480 VGA black and white computer monitor. That screen, with only 307,200 pixels, is capable of displaying EVERY human face on this planet, one at a time. Now imagine running a random program to fill in bits on the screen. Ever think that you'll see the image of a person?!

Your reading comprehension skills and lack of insight are a bit irritating. You don't actually refute any of my technical points. You repeat things that you think mean something and ignore my very pertinent responses to them. Part of the problem here is that your "standards" are utterly arbitrary.

So here is my final attempt. Read Chapter 4 "Algorithmic Probability" in the following text:

An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications
By: Li and Vitanyi
Publisher: Springer-Verlag

This text is the de-facto reference standard for the large body of mathematics loosely associated with the Kolmogorov information theory, but is moderately accessible to someone with a solid grounding in basic mathematics. It is by far the most widely referenced text in academic papers on this topic. This area of mathematics is deeply fundamental to computational processes and software theory of all types.

I have just given you the relevant chapter of THE reference standard for the topic we are discussing, which due to its being a de-facto standard is widely available as such things go (a university library probably has it). If you can show me where my understanding of the mathematics contradicts the text, I will very publicly apologize and admit that you are correct. It is certainly possible that I am wrong, but since I'm extraordinarily competent at that area of mathematics and have used it for years to successfully design very sophisticated systems, I find it improbable.

I believe this is reasonable. Why waste our time arguing about it when we can go straight to the source. Unless, of course, you doubt the validity of that branch of mathematics despite its widespread practical application.

"If you can show me where my understanding of the mathematics contradicts the text, I will very publicly apologize and admit that you are correct."

No problem. Please click on the link in post #310 to see your mathematics for a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a millions producing Shakespeare (as well as computer programs self-forming) - totally debunked, with sources, charts, and verifiable calculations included in the link.

Folklore is that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a million years will produce the collected works of Shakespeare. - Southack

"That wasn't folklore, it was a clever pedestrian description of the theorem." - tortoise

That's what you're trying to say when you claim that useful software programs can just form on their own in a computer if you leave it on long enough. - Southack

"Yes, that is what I'm trying to say. - tortoise

Except that the MATH in the link on Post #310 conclusively disproves what you are trying to say...

Please click on the link in post #310 to see your mathematics for a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a millions producing Shakespeare (as well as computer programs self-forming) - totally debunked, with sources, charts, and verifiable calculations included in the link.

You have a pretty limited imagination. Impractical and difficult isn't the same thing as impossible. Just like "finite but very large" isn't even qualitatively the same as "infinite". As I pointed out earlier, while the Million Monkey example isn't practical in any standard context, it is actually quite possibly to speculate unverifiable but non-false means by which such a computation could be accomplished on a relatively small system using known science. Certainly many very bright and famous scientists have written papers on how such extreme computation might be accomplished within the normal constraints of our universe. I don't know what the point would be though. (And of course, once you remove the constraint of the universe, all bets are off by default. Not that it matters.)

Rubbish. The final probability, which you don't even know because you probably didn't even read that far, mathematically shows that 17 Billion monkeys in each of 17 Billion planets typing for 17 Billion years would have less of a chance of typing THE FIRST SENTENCE of Hamlet than a single lottery ticket has the chance of winning a single lottery.

So no, you can't get Hamlet out of randomness, much less the entire collected works of Shakespeare, and certainly not a sophisticated computer program.

It's in the math.

Read the link in Post #310. The MATH debunks your claims, and that's why you can never produce the examples that you naively called "trivial".

That's why you will flee this debate with lame excuses rather than attempt to post the math that you said was likewise "trivial".

You have confused folklore with science, and now you've been busted.

Except that the MATH in the link on Post #310 conclusively disproves what you are trying to say...

You know, I really can't believe that this has digressed to the point of us talking about mathematics that you should have learned in high school (at the latest). One divided by any finite number is NOT zero. The state of the universe is actually irrelevant to the mathematics by the way. Even if the universe had the lifespan of a fruitfly and the diameter of an orange, the mathematics would still be true.

Big hint: The universe does not define mathematics, but mathematics does apply to the universe. In other words, mathematics is not constrained by the universe we live in. And no I'm not going to prove the first assertion, as that gets real esoteric almost from the get go.

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