Seeing God in the Physics Lab

AISH ^ | Fall 2003 | Dr. Gerald Schroeder

[yonif]

	http://www.aish.com/societyWork/sciencenature/Seeing_God_in_the_Physics_Lab.asp

Seeing God in the Physics Lab
by Dr. Gerald Schroeder

That is to say:

The Lord is One. (Deut. 6:4)

There is nothing else. (Deut. 4:35, 39)

"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)

E=mc2 (A. Einstein)

On that day the Lord shall be One and His name One. (Zechariah 14:9)

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?

From where does the complex order inherent in every form of life arise?

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

SOURCE OF DNA INFORMATION

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?

IN THE BEGINNING

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:

Bereishit bara Elokim et ha'shamayim v'et ha'aretz.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

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:

In the beginning from total and absolute nothing, the Creator brought forth a substance so thin it had no corporeality. But this substanceless substance could take on form. This was the only physical creation. Now this creation was a very small point, and from this all things that ever were or will be formed...

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.

As the equation of words states:

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.

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[Age of Reason]

Remember that quote.

You may one day see scientists reinvent it.

[Held_to_Ransom]

You may one day see scientists reinvent it

Learn it, you mean. God already knows it.

[Age of Reason]

Perhaps.

But I am an agnostic.

[AmishDude]

In my classroom, lots of people try to talk to God. Especially on test day.

[Ayn Rand wannabe]

Kinda reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw in one of my classrooms once..."As long as there are tests, there will always be prayer in public school."

[Held_to_Ransom]

But I am an agnostic.

Ah, good. Then at least you know what it is you have yet to learn. Agnosticism is merely a confession of ignorance.

[rdb3]

All you folks are are a bunch of losers who cannot discuss scientific issues because you are not interested in science. You are just interested in promoting atheism.

There it is. That's it in a nutshell.

So why bother with them?

[Buggman]

LOL True, true.

[PatrickHenry]

[VadeRetro]

The astute lurker is invited to note that after all that silly blue spew, the evidence picture for very early complex life is, minus one typo, exactly as I characterized it in post 23.

Schroeder's claim looks to me to be based upon Schopf's identification of cyanobacteria in 3.5 million billion-year-old Australian rock, a claim which is no longer widely accepted and which Schopf at least for a time withdrew. Most people now think these "fossils" are in fact carbon from geological processes. I believe the next-oldest (and non-controversial) fossils are quite a bit younger. Schroeder is thus making hay with "evidence" of very shaky status.

[tx_eggman]

For sure buddy ...

... In the beginning

[tx_eggman]

Post 91 is in answer to Sloth's question "Does a Bereishit in the forest?" in post 9

[Age of Reason]

Agnosticism is merely a confession of ignorance.

And maybe god is the name we give to the limit of human understanding.

[PatrickHenry]

B l u e S p e w B o y

[Alamo-Girl]

I've read the articles you linked and did some additional research to see if I could find where Schopf withdrew his assertions. If there is such a statement by Schopf, would you please direct me to it?

I have found a lot of challenge and cross-challenge, but by all appearances the issue is not settled. Following is a seminar scheduled for November to air the issues:

First Announcement: The Hunt for Precambrian Life: An Integrated Approach

For Lurkers, here is a summary of the challenge and cross challenge:

Ancient Fossils or Just Plain Rock In the above article it appears the challengers are arguing along the same lines as the irreducible complexity debate that betty boop previously examined. IOW, in that debate the rebuttal was that any plausible theory defeats the claim of irreducible complexity. As an example, here is an excerpt from the above article:

Fossil claims, Brasier writes in his email, "are better tested by falsification rather than by justification. To that end, our research group urges that future studies (older than, say, 3.0 billion years) should explore the following null hypothesis: that very ancient/alien microfossil-like structures … should not be accepted as of biological origin until all possibilities of their non-biologic origin have been tested and can be falsified."

Or to paraphrase that in the "irreducible complexity" debate:

Claims of irreducible complexity are better tested by falsification rather than by justification. To that end, evolutionists urge that future studies of flagella should explore the following null hypothesis: that such structures … should not be accepted as irreducibly complex until all possibilities of their biologic origin can be falsified.

Or to sum it up, IMHO both challenges sound like an assertion of intellectual prejudice --- perhaps to maintain a materialist paradigm?

[betty boop]

...both challenges sound like an assertion of intellectual prejudice -- perhaps to maintain a materialist paradigm?

A-G, it may be well to remember here that the "materialist paradigm" really is a metaphysical view. As such, it may have close similarities to the religious view. Perhaps what is being defended here is a "type" of quasi-religious doctrine....

[PatrickHenry]

... the rebuttal was that any plausible theory defeats the claim of irreducible complexity ...

This makes sense to me. Perhaps it's just my bias, but it seems that the ID camp is claiming: "no possible way could this thing ever have evolved naturally!" That's the claim which, in my opinion, bears the burden of proof. And it's a very difficult burden. I agree with what Alamo-Girl said (or quoted?) that any plausible theory defeats such a claim. I've used that argument myself regarding the evolution of the eye.

[VadeRetro]

I first heard about Schopf's problems from Nebullis, whom I'm pinging here. She IIRC mentioned that he had at least temporarily withdrawn his claim. He would have been under pressure to do so, given the charges, but since then, on further review, he's sticking to his story.

His problems apparently started with claims by a graduate assistant that he had carefully selected biologic-looking "fossils," deliberately excluding those whose appearance cast doubt on his interpretation.

My reaction was strictly, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" I have fat-fingered long passages from Schopf's book in on many a thread, there being no on-line copy. (For instance, here. My hard-disk shows about 18 such threads, but there have no doubt been many more. I used to use him a lot.)

I think he's still a fine source on early-earth conditions except that he's hurt himself with this controversy. That's probably why some of his colleagues are now suggesting that the bar be raised for making claims of very early complex life. He had his reasons, but he may have jumped a bit too quickly and embarrassed himself. They're basically saying, "Maybe we need a checklist of things to do before making the big announcement."

[VadeRetro]

... the rebuttal was that any plausible theory defeats the claim of irreducible complexity ...

It certainly defeats any claim of the form "Feature X cannot have evolved."

[Nebullis]

The controversy over the early fossils continues.

When Schopf published a paper in Nature, last December, claiming new lines of evidence for the fossils, an article by Brasier, in the same issue, claiming the fossils are artifacts. Schopf has been fairly silent but for a partial retraction, i.e., the fossils are not cyanobacteria, but he insist they are biogenic. The age of the fossils is not in question. Three months later, Pasteris and Wopenka published a paper in Nature claiming that the the laser-Raman spectroscopy that Schopf used as evidence in the December paper does not indicate biogenic origin. Schopf counters that such wasn't the only line of evidence, that cellular morphology and carbonaceous molecular-structural make-up supports the biogenic origin of the Raman signature.

I'm sure we haven't heard the end of it.