Download ARMAD Kickoff: Task 2 - St. John`s Richmond Church

Modern Physics and
Ancient Faith
A summary of the book by Stephen Barr
Mike Davenport
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
3
Purpose of the Book
Presuppositional Apologetics:
• “this book is not about proofs”
• “Science, it was claimed, had fulfilled the
materialist’s expectations and
confounded the religious believer’s.
• “In this book, I am making the same claim, but in reverse:
• I am claiming that on the critical points, recent discoveries
have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and
confirm those of the believer in God.
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Not About Proofs
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
6
Scientific Materialism
“The basic tenet of so-called “scientific materialism” is that nothing
exists except matter, and that everything in the world must therefore
be the result of the strict mathematical laws of physics and blind
chance.”
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Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology
• Read pp 4-5
Hitchens
Dawkins
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Materialist Myth 1
“Biblical religions originated in pre-scientific attempts to explain natural
phenomena”
False:
• Bible shows almost no interest in explaining natural phenomena
• The Bible helped clear the ground for science by
“depersonalizing” the natural world:
• Trees, sun, oceans are no longer supernatural
• Supernatural is focused in a personal God
• Not interested in supernatural explanations of nature
• Hence: science sprang from Christians and Jews (mostly)
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Materialist Myth 2
“Church vs Galileo was typical of Christian attitude to science”
False:
• Condemnation of Galileo was “manifestly an anomaly”
• Galileo is the only example of the Catholic Church condemning a
scientific theory.
• “the attitude of the church has overwhelmingly been one of
friendliness to scientific enquiry”
• Many important scientific figures were monks, priests and
bishops
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Materialist Myth 3
“Faith is opposed to rational enquiry and puts an end to thought”
False:
• The ideal of Christian theology is “faith seeking understanding”
and “I believe so that I may understand” (St. Augustine)
• Belief in God suggests that reality is completely rational and
intelligible
• We are finite and God is infinite, so we believe that even things
that are unintelligible to us, are intelligible to God.
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Materialist Irony #1
While faith does not limit what we are able to think about, materialism
does:
• Materialists do not allow themselves to contemplate things that
are not completely describable by physics.
• Ironically, materialist views are thus more narrow minded and
more dogmatic than religious views.
• The arguments for materialism are all, ultimately, circular:
“materialism is true because it must be true.”
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
13
110 Years Ago
• Time was a single dimension stretching infinitely far into the past
and the future
• To think of a “beginning of time” made no more sense than to
think of an “edge of the universe”
• There was no hint of the
“beginning” that people
of faith believed in.
t
y
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Einstein / Spacetime / Big Bang
1916:
• Einstein’s General Relativity suggested that the universe could
be expanding or contracting
1920s:
• Hubble and others observed that the universe is expanding
• LeMaitre (a Roman Catholic priest) suggested all could have
started with a Big Bang
1964:
• Light from the Big Bang
is observed
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Current Big-Bang Cosmology
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Big Bang a (Slight) Problem for Materialists
• When the universe was thought to exist forever, it was hard to
imagine a creator
• Now there is much contemplation of cosmologies with pulsating
universes, “bubble” universes, colliding universes, etc.
• All intended to problem a “non-creation” explanation for the
universe
• Actually not a problem but rather fun for scientists – hard to
be proved wrong
Problem remains (e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre): why is there something,
rather than nothing?
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Moral of the Big Bang History
Don’t water down or deny
what the Bible teaches
just because
materialists insist
something else must
be true.
Blue: Energy emanating from
the nebula around the dying
star PSR B1509-58.
Red: A neighboring gas cloud
called RCW 89.
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
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Argument from Design
Thomas Acquinas (1270)
Isaac Newton (1687)
William Paley (1802):
• Saw evidence for God in the natural world.
• “In crossing a heath, suppose I found an iPhone upon the
ground, and it should be inquired how the iPhone happened to
be in that place. The iPhone functionality being observed, the
inference, we think, is inevitable, that the iPhone must have had
a maker who comprehended its construction, and designed its
use.”
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Argument from Design
Thomas Acquinas (1270)
Isaac Newton (1687)
William Paley (1802):
• Saw evidence for God in the natural world.
• “In crossing a heath, suppose I found a watch upon the
ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to
be in that place. The watch’s functionality being observed, the
inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had
a maker who comprehended its construction, and designed its
use.”
• Thus: there must have been a watchmaker.
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Blind Watchmaker
Dawkin’s critique of Paley:
• Evolution is the “Blind Watchmaker”
• Complexities of nature explained by random chance.
Barr’s critique of Dawkin:
• “Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have
come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense
automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that
he has completely answered Paley’s point.”
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More Generally…
In science, order comes from order:
• Barr: “In every case where science explains order, it does so, in
the final analysis, by appealing to a greater, more impressive,
and more comprehensive underlying orderliness.”
• “We now have the
problem of explaining
not merely a butterfly’s
wing, but a universe
that can produce
butterfly wings.”
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Materialist Irony #2
Materialists postulate (as they must) that this pervasive order must
have come about by chance:
• David Hume: “Many worlds might have been botched and
bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out.”
Barr:
• “How ironic that, having renounced belief in God because God is
not material or observable by sense or instrument, the atheist
may be driven to postulate not one but an infinite of
unobservables in the material world itself!”
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
25
Man’s Place in the Universe
David:
• “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the
moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man
that you are mindful of him?”
Materialist View:
• Stephen Jay Gould: The human race is a freak accident of
evolutionary history, “a tiny twig on an ancient tree of life”
• Stephen Weinberg: “The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
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Anthropic Coincidences
Definition:
• “Many features of the laws of physics seem to coincide exactly
with what is required for the emergence of life to be possible.”
Barr looks at:
• Strength of the Strong Nuclear Force
• Three-Alpha process
• Stability of the Proton
• Strength of the Electromagnetic Force
• Vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field
• Cosmological constant
• Flatness of space
• Number of dimensions in space
n
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Why is n the size it is?
• n is the sum of a bunch of positive and negative values
• Those values are typically 100,000,000,000,000,000 time as big
as n
• There is no obvious reason why they should cancel each other
out
• If n was even 1.4 times as large as it is, the heavier elements
(that we are made of) would not have formed.
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Objections to the Anthropic Coincidences
1) Maybe they aren’t really needed for life to evolve
• Many of them are so fundamental that it is extremely hard to
imagine life without them
2) Maybe they derive from some deeper laws
• Then the deeper laws become anthropic coincidences
3) Maybe “God had no choice”
• “If any theoretical physicist were paid a dollar for every possible
universe he could think up, he would get rick very quickly”
• “God had a choice – an infinite number of choices”
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
30
Can Matter Understand?
Materialists insist that the brain is a computer.
Question:
• What two even integers (positive or negative) add together to 17 ?
Because the boundaries of the question are infinite, a computer will
search forever for an answer.
• The computer does not understand
• We understand
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Gödel / Lucas / Penrose Argument
Gödel's incompleteness theorem:
• Even in an ideal artificial intelligence
(AI) there will be true statements
understandable by that AI, whose
truth cannot be evaluated by the AI.
Lucas / Penrose:
• Because Gödel was able to prove that those statements (the
ones that the AI can’t prove to be true) are true, then Godel is not
an AI.
• Thus Gödel's brain (at least) was not a computer.
(the full proof is harder than this)
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Is Man a Machine?
“Thus the idea that man can be
nothing other than a machine is
really nothing other than a pure
deduction from atheism. There is
not a shred of positive evidence
that a material system can
reproduce the human abilities to
understand abstractly and will
freely.”
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
34
110 Years Ago
• Every indication coming from scientific research was that we
lived in a physically deterministic world
• Thus if people are physical creatures, then people had no free
will – all is predetermined.
• “One of the few areas where scientific theories had the potential
to be in clear conflict with religious doctrine.”
t
y
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Determinism and Free Will
Quantum Mechanics (1920s):
• Strict determinism is overthrown
• Completely unexpected by scientists
Barr:
• Quantum theory will not succeed in explaining free will
• But religious people would not expect it to: free will stems from
our spiritual nature
However:
• Quantum indeterminacy “provides an opening for free will”
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Materialism and Free Will
Barr: “If free will exists, then scientific materialism is wrong”
Thus, not surprisingly:
• Materialists deny that we have free will
• Some say it is altogether an illusion
• Same say it just means that the choice was made without
coercion from outside the person’s body
[Paul says that without the Holy Spirit we have no free will – we are
slaves to sin.]
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Materialist Irony #3
“Those who think being “scientific” means being ready at the drop of a
hat to debunk anything that seems obvious, or being willing to
disregard all that is intuitively known, are walking a foolish and
treacherous path.”
• Leads to pure skepticism about everything, including science
• “There was a time when religious skeptics proudly called
themselves “free thinkers.” It is ironic that the modern materialist
skeptic disbelieves even in the reality of his own freedom, both
moral and intellectual.”
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Unique Role of the Observer
Conventional quantum mechanics says:
• As long as a system is unobserved, all possible outcomes coexist as “mixed states”
• Once an observation is made, the mixed state collapses into a
single reality.
A very uncomfortable concept for materialists, because the “observer”
seems to be something fundamentally different from the “observed.”
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Many-Worlds Interpretation
One way to make the observers “just material”:
• Assume that the mixed states never collapse
• Instead all possible outcome happen (one world sprouts many
worlds)
• We (conscious people) experience a single reality because we
are zooming through one specific set of those many worlds.
YIKES:
• “The price to be paid for eliminating the observer and the
observer’s mind from the picture in this way, however, is the
postulating of an infinite number of branches of reality, with an
infinite number of versions of every person, that are completely
unobservable to us.”
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Outline
Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism
Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:
1)
The Beginning of Time
2)
Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)
3)
Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)
4)
Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)
5)
Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)
Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.
41
Is a Pattern Emerging?
“The materialist seems to be forced to assert of himself not only that he
is a machine, which for most people is absurd enough, but that he is
really an infinite number of inconsistent machines dividing and
subdividing into more and more realities in a universe that is only
one of an infinite number of universes, many of which are also
dividing and subdividing.”
vs the Christian view:
• “For by him (Christ) all things were created: things on heaven
and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or
rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.
He is before all things and in him all things hold together.”
1 Col 1:16