Note: This weekend a friend asked me to recommend some resources on the fine-tuning of the universe. Since I had those handy, I thought it might be useful to turn it into a post.]
The heavens tell of the glory of God,” claimed the Psalmist, “The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship.” The ancient musician intuited aesthetically what modern cosmology is able to show mathematically. The arrangement of natural laws and other features provides not only stirring examples of the handiwork of our Creator but provides us with a strong argument for His existence.
Teleological arguments are arguments from the order in the universe to the existence of God. One of the most persuasive, yet least proffered, arguments of this type is the argument based on the “fine-tuning” of the universe for the existence of life forms. At least two dozen demandingly exact physical constants must be in place for carbon-based life to exist (see list at end of post), the slightest variation in any of these conditions—even to a minuscule degree—would have rendered the universe unfit for the existence of any kind of life.
“At least on the face of it, these so–called “anthropic coincidences” would appear to support the idea that we were built–in from the beginning,” says physicist Stephen Barr. “Even some former atheists and agnostics have seen in them impressive evidence of a divine plan.”
Indeed, as I hope to show, anthropic coincidences can form the basis of one of the most sound teleological arguments:
The apparent fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
The apparent fine-tuning is not due to physical necessity or chance.
Therefore, it is due to design.
The first option, physical necessity, is the easiest to dismiss. The idea that it was physically impossible for the universe to have been created in any way other than in a manner that would support life is neither logically necessary nor scientifically plausible. As Barr notes, “In the final analysis one cannot escape from two very basic facts: the laws of nature did not have to be as they are; and the laws of nature had to be very special in form if life were to be possible.” Our options, therefore, are between chance (the anthropic coincidences truly are coincidences) or design (the parameters needed for life were purposely arranged). While it cannot be established with absolute certainty, we can, I believe, determine that design is the most probable explanation.
There is little dispute that probability of this series of “coincidences” occurring is infinitesimally small. Still, it is often argued that since we exist then the probability must be 1. In their book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, John Barrow and Frank Tipler contend that we ought not be surprised at observing the universe to be as it is and that therefore no explanation of its fine-tuning is needed. In other words, we can only observe the need for fine-tuning in universes that support life.
Surprisingly, this dubious argument is often used as if it were a silver bullet that destroys the fine-tuning argument. But philosopher John Leslie (as told by William Lane Craig) provides an illustration of why such reasoning is faulty:
Suppose you are dragged before a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all of them with rifles aimed at your heart, to be executed. The command is given; you hear the deafening sound of the guns. And you observe that you are still alive, that all of the 100 marksmen missed! Now while it is true that
5. You should not be surprised that you do not observe that you are dead,
nonetheless it is equally true that
6. You should be surprised that you do observe that you are alive.
Since the firing squad’s missing you altogether is extremely improbable, the surprise expressed in (6) is wholly appropriate, though you are not surprised that you do not observe that you are dead, since if you were dead you could not observe it. Similarly, while we should not be surprised that we do not observe features of the universe which are incompatible with our existence, it is nevertheless true that
7. We should be surprised that we do observe features of the universe which are compatible with our existence,
in view of the enormous improbability that the universe should possess such features.
Barr also provide a helpful analogy:
Suppose you were looking for a specific obscure recipe for, say, goulash. If the first book you took at random from the cooking shelf of the library happened to have exactly that recipe, you would regard it as a great coincidence. If you then discovered that the book contained every recipe for goulash ever invented, you would cease to regard it as coincidental that it had the one of particular interest to you. But you would be surprised nonetheless, for one does not expect a cookbook to treat that particular category of food so comprehensively. The fact that it happened to be so comprehensive in its selection of goulash, when it was goulash that you needed, would itself count as a remarkable coincidence.
Another problem I find with this line of thinking is that it implies that the probability of a stochastically independent event is determined by the existence of an observer. For example, imagine a universe that is exactly like ours yet contains no carbon-based life forms. We could determine the factors required for such an existence and calculate the probability of such constants appearing as they do. The result, of course, would be an infinitesimally small probability. The implication made by opponents of fine-tuning, though, is that the probability suddenly becomes 1 by the mere addition of a human observer. Such a conclusion is exceedingly absurd.
Most critics of fine-tuning have begun to recognize that this approach is insufficient. Faced with scientific evidence that undermines their agnostic assumptions, they turn to metaphysical speculation in the form of the “multiple universes” theory. There is a distinction, however, between the mulitple-domains within one universe and the multiple independent universes. As Barr explains:
In the version that physicists take seriously, the many “universes” are not really distinct and separate universes at all, but domains or regions of one all–encompassing Universe. The domains are far apart in space, or otherwise prevented from communicating with each other. Conditions are assumed to be so different from one domain to another that they appear superficially to have different physical laws. However, at a deeper level all the domains are really controlled by one and the same set of fundamental laws. These laws also control what types of domains the universe has, and how many of each type.
The other version of the idea posits the existence of a large number of universes that really are universes, distinct and unconnected in any way with each other. Each has its own set of physical laws. There is no overarching physical system of which each is a part. One can understand why this version is not discussed among scientists. At least in the many–domains version all the domains are part of the same universe as we, so that, even if we cannot in practice observe them directly, we might hope at least to infer their existence theoretically from a deep understanding of the laws of nature. In the many–universes version, this is not the case.
Briefly stated, the multiple universe theory is the hypotheses that if the universe contains an exhaustively infinite number of universes—all of which actually exist—then anything that can occur with non-vanishing probability will occur somewhere. While it might be true that the probability that our universe could develop in a way that supports life is incredibly small, these critics claim that in an infinite series of universes even the improbable is likely to happen quite often.
Such a move, however, commits the inverse gambler’s fallacy, which states that an improbable event can be made less improbable by the hypothesis that many similar events exist, and that the hypothesis is thence confirmed by the improbable event. Even if multiple independent universes do exist, though, it does not change the probability that our universe would turn out as it did. Again, to use an illustration by John Leslie:
There is no need for us to ask whether very great alterations in these affairs would have rendered it fully possible once more, let alone whether physical worlds conforming to very different laws could have been observer-permitting without being in any way fine tuned. Here it can be useful to think of a fly on a wall, surrounded by an empty region. A bullet hits the fly. Two explanations suggest themselves. Perhaps many bullets are hitting the wall or perhaps a marksman fired the bullet. There is no need to ask whether distant areas of the wall, or other quite different walls, are covered with flies so that more or less any bullet striking there would have hit one. The important point is that the local area contains just the one fly.
Having reduced the chance hypothesis to a virtual impossibility we are left with the obvious conclusion that the fine-tuning is not only apparent but actual. While this fine-tuning does not imply that the existence of a tuner is absolutely certain, it certainly makes it more probable than not. Unless one starts with the assumption that the Fine Tuner cannot or must not exist, it seems more probable (at least as a Baynesian inference that such a Being actually does exist.
Of course it must be noted that the the uses of such teleological argument are not likely to persuade the unbelief in the existence of God. As I have said many time before the unbeliever suffers from a form of invincible ignorance. There are no metaphysical and illogical knots the agnostically inclined will not twist themselves into in order to avoid having to admit that the existence of God is more reasonable and probable than its alternative.
Notes:A few people have pointed out that the original list I used by astrophysicist Hugh Ross includes too many anthropic coincidences. I’ve decided to replace it with an explanation by Jay Richards, co-author of The Privileged Planet:
Cosmic Parameters
(1) Gravitational force constant (large scale attractive force, holds people on planets, and holds planets, stars, and galaxies together)—too weak, and planets and stars cannot form; too strong, and stars burn up too quickly.
(2) Electromagnetic force constant (small scale attractive and repulsive force, holds atoms electrons and atomic nuclei together)—If it were much stronger or weaker, we wouldn’t have stable chemical bonds.
(3) Strong nuclear force constant (small-scale attractive force, holds nuclei of atoms together, which otherwise repulse each other because of the electromagnetic force)—if it were weaker, the universe would have far fewer stable chemical elements, eliminating several that are essential to life.
(4) Weak nuclear force constant (governs radioactive decay)—if it were much stronger or weaker, life-essential stars could not form.
(These are the four “fundamental forces.”)
(5) Cosmological constant (which controls the expansion speed of the universe) refers to the balance of the attractive force of gravity with a hypothesized repulsive force of space observable only at very large size scales. It must be very close to zero, that is, these two forces must be nearly perfectly balanced. To get the right balance, the cosmological constant must be fine-tuned to something like 1 part in 10^120. If it were just slightly more positive, the universe would fly apart; slightly negative, and the universe would collapse.
As with the cosmological constant, the ratios of the other constants must be fine-tuned relative to each other. Since the logically-possible range of strengths of some forces is potentially infinite, to get a handle on the precision of fine-tuning, theorists often think in terms of the range of force strengths, with gravity the weakest, and the strong nuclear force the strongest. The strong nuclear force is 10^40 times stronger than gravity, that is, ten thousand, billion, billion, billion, billion times the strength of gravity. Think of that range as represented by a ruler stretching across the entire observable universe, about 15 billion light years. If we increased the strength of gravity by just 1 part in 10^34 of the range of force strengths (the equivalent of moving less than one inch on the universe-long ruler), the universe couldn’t have life sustaining planets.
(6) Initial Conditions. Besides physical constants, there are initial or boundary conditions, which describe the conditions present at the beginning of the universe. Initial conditions are independent of the physical constants. One way of summarizing the initial conditions is to speak of the extremely low entropy (that is, a highly ordered) initial state of the universe. This refers to the initial distribution of mass energy. In The Road to Reality, physicist Roger Penrose estimates that the odds of the initial low entropy state of our universe occurring by chance alone are on the order of 1 in 10^10(123). This ratio is vastly beyond our powers of comprehension. Since we know a life-bearing universe is intrinsically interesting, this ratio should be more than enough to raise the question: Why does such a universe exist? If someone is unmoved by this ratio, then they probably won’t be persuaded by additional examples of fine-tuning.
“Local” Planetary Conditions
But even in a universe fine-tuned at the cosmic level, local conditions can still vary dramatically. As it happens, even in this fine-tuned universe, the vast majority of locations in the universe are unsuited for life. In The Privileged Planet, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards identify 12 broad, widely recognized fine-tuning factors required to build a single, habitable planet. All 12 factors can be found together in the Earth. There are probably many more such factors. In fact, most of these factors could be split out to make sub-factors, since each of them contributes in multiple ways to a planet’s habitability.
(7) Steady plate tectonics with right kind of geological interior (which allows the carbon cycle and generates a protective magnetic field). If the Earth’s crust were significantly thicker, plate tectonic recycling could not take place.
(8) Right amount of water in crust (which provides the universal solvent for life).
(9) Large moon with right planetary rotation period (which stabilizes a planet’s tilt and contributes to tides). In the case of the Earth, the gravitational pull of its moon stabilizes the angle of its axis at a nearly constant 23.5 degrees. This ensures relatively temperate seasonal changes, and the only climate in the solar system mild enough to sustain complex living organisms.
(10) Proper concentration of sulfur (which is necessary for important biological processes).
(11) Right planetary mass (which allows a planet to retain the right type and right thickness of atmosphere). If the Earth were smaller, its magnetic field would be weaker, allowing the solar wind to strip away our atmosphere, slowly transforming our planet into a dead, barren world much like Mars.
(12) Near inner edge of circumstellar habitable zone (which allows a planet to maintain the right amount of liquid water on the surface). If the Earth were just 5% closer to the Sun, it would be subject to the same fate as Venus, a runaway greenhouse effect, with temperatures rising to nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Conversely, if the Earth were about 20% farther from the Sun, it would experience runaway glaciations of the kind that has left Mars sterile.
(13) Low-eccentricity orbit outside spin-orbit and giant planet resonances (which allows a planet to maintain a safe orbit over a long period of time).
(14) A few, large Jupiter-mass planetary neighbors in large circular orbits (which protects the habitable zone from too many comet bombardments). If the Earth were not protected by the gravitational pulls of Jupiter and Saturn, it would be far more susceptible to collisions with devastating comets that would cause mass extinctions. As it is, the larger planets in our solar system provide significant protection to the Earth from the most dangerous comets.
(15) Outside spiral arm of galaxy (which allows a planet to stay safely away from supernovae).
(16) Near co-rotation circle of galaxy, in circular orbit around galactic center (which enables a planet to avoid traversing dangerous parts of the galaxy).
(17) Within the galactic habitable zone (which allows a planet to have access to heavy elements while being safely away from the dangerous galactic center).
(18) During the cosmic habitable age (when heavy elements and active stars exist without too high a concentration of dangerous radiation events).
This is a very basic list of “ingredients” for building a single, habitable planet. At the moment, we have only rough probabilities for most of these items. For instance, we know that less than ten percent of stars even in the Milky Way Galaxy are within the galactic habitable zone. And the likelihood of getting just the right kind of moon by chance is almost certainly very low, though we have no way of calculating just how low. What we can say is that the vast majority of possible locations in the visible universe, even within otherwise habitable galaxies, are incompatible with life.
[Disclaimer: This is a hastily thrown together blog post and not a philosophical or scientific paper. While I think the overall argument is sound, I may have flubbed a few of the details within. Take those cum grano salis.]
October 4th, 2010 | 3:49 pm
[...] On fine-tuning the universe. [...]
October 4th, 2010 | 5:10 pm
[...] Joe Carter (Fine-Tuning an Argument and a Universe) I followed a link to this page on Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist who has identified twenty-six [...]
October 4th, 2010 | 5:31 pm
“The implication made by opponents of fine-tuning, though, is that the probability suddenly becomes 1 by the mere addition of a human observer. Such a conclusion is exceedingly absurd.”
I am no opponent of the idea that fine-tuning points in the direction of design. Yet, by definition, the probability that something exists when it exists is 1.0. I say again, by definition. Arguments using probability to demonstrate (or negate) a creator always fail due to the uniqueness of the claim. Probability _assumes_ that the other possible outcomes also exist somewhere, sometime, otherwise, again by definition, their probability is 0.0.
I believe that the probability of the existence of God is 1.0. I believe that the probability of the non-existence of God is 0.0. Given the uniqueness of God, those are the only two possible probabilities. Unless you happen to be a polytheist and the argument is whether a particular god exists or not.
To me, the main force of the fine-tuning argument is the attempt to explain how something like that came into existence. The multiverse hypothesis can resolve the problem without the immediate _need_ for design. However, we cannot observe any other universe except our own. If we could, that observation would be in our universe not in a second. So multiverse makes no more sense than design and has the added problem of how did the multiverse come into existence.
To sum up, probability is weird, be careful with it.
October 4th, 2010 | 5:35 pm
Design: the fallback explanation for the currently unexplainable.
October 4th, 2010 | 5:48 pm
The link to John Leslie’s piece doesn’t work, which is unfortunate since the excerpt is far from clear, taken out of context. Also, it might (just possibly!) be worth noting that he is arguing against the claim that the inverse gambler’s fallacy is at work in this context. The Wikipedia piece that you also link to says that he is arguing that the cosmological argument situation is not like the fly example. According to Leslie it is more like observing a roll of double sixes after we’ve been told we will be admitted to the gambling room once double sixes have been rolled. In general, if we observe double sixes, we can’t infer that other rolls have been made beforehand, but in the case where our presence is conditional on it occurring, we can make such a probabilistic inference.
October 4th, 2010 | 6:18 pm
Science will save us: the fallback explanation when we don’t like where the evidence leads.
October 4th, 2010 | 6:59 pm
Mike Melendez writes: Yet, by definition, the probability that something exists when it exists is 1.0. . . . Probability _assumes_ that the other possible outcomes also exist somewhere, sometime, otherwise, again by definition, their probability is 0.0.”
No Mr. Melendez. Your statement makes sense only if one measures the probability after the outcome. Say you are playing poker with Joe, who is dealing. The odds that Joe will deal himself a royal flush in spades is 1 in 2,598,960. Let’s say he deals himself a royal flush in spades 13 times in a row. The odds of a series of events is simply the product of the odds of all of the events. Therefore the odds of Joe receiving 13 royal flushes in spades in a row is about 2.74^-71.
Now it seems to me that under your analysis above, you would have to say, “Well, I don’t understand it, but since it actually happened, I guess that over the course of that 13 hands the probability of you dealing yourself 13 royal flushes in spades was one, and the odds of any other hand combination would be zero.”
But that is exactly what you are saying in your comment about the fine tuning argument.
October 4th, 2010 | 7:03 pm
Chris writes: “Design: the fallback explanation for the currently unexplainable.”
Chris, smug platitudes will only get you so far. Do you have substantive response to Joe’s argument such as say . . . a counter-argument? Yeah, a counter-argument would be nice.
October 4th, 2010 | 7:16 pm
The deconstruction of this whole line of reasoning shows up in paragraph 3 with the use of the word “must,” which is a word of assertion, not a word of demonstration.
I generally agree with Mike Melendez, and I would add this: the argument comes down to a definition of terms of what is meant by “God.” If by that term you mean a power greater than ourselves which encompasses the dynamic nature of the universe, then that certainly exists, demonstrated by de facto observation (we did not create ourselves, despite what Derrida and that whole crowd says).
If by that term you mean a specific being who takes specific form, according to one or more extant texts or traditions, then that becomes much more problematic.
You betray your ultimate intent by the use of the word “teleological” to introduce paragraph 3. You have a specific outcome in mind, so you struggle through several paragraphs of closely-reasoned text to get no farther than you would have if you just simply asserted “God exists,” and stopped right there. Such a statement is no more nor less refutable than all of your reasoning, and a heck of a lot easier to wade through. That assertion is readily apparent to you, and your reasoning is not going to persuade anyone who didn’t already agree with you, in principal.
There is a discussion about the nature of God worth having, but this isn’t it.
October 4th, 2010 | 8:14 pm
Joe,
I’m very sympathetic to your position, but I don’t agree with you invocation of the inverse gambler’s fallacy in response to the multiverse argument.
The odds of me winning the Powerball are 1 in 70 million or whatever. If I win this week, I might think to myself, what an amazing event, I must have won this for a reason — someone wanted me to win. But if 200 million people played the lottery this week, the probability that someone won are fairly high, without any special rigging of the system to make me or anyone in particular win. Again, the chance that I would win are always 1 in 70 million, and from my perspective, it may seems like Providence wanted me to win, but from an overall viewpoint, it’s not that significant. I just happen to be the lucky chap who won.
Now suppose instead that I play the Powerball, but I’m the only person in the nation who played, and I then win. That would be a whole different story. It would make you wonder if the game wasn’t fixed or if Providence wasn’t really picking me to win.
October 4th, 2010 | 9:00 pm
Alex Howerton: If by that term you mean a power greater than ourselves which encompasses the dynamic nature of the universe, then that certainly exists, demonstrated by de facto observation (we did not create ourselves, despite what Derrida and that whole crowd says).
It’s obvious we did not create ourselves, but it’s not obvious that “a power greater than ourselves that encompasses the dynamic nature of the universe” did. The only thing that’s obvious is that something else did. You need to back up the stronger claim with some evidence. In part, that’s what the teleological argument is trying to do.
You betray your ultimate intent by the use of the word “teleological” to introduce paragraph 3. You have a specific outcome in mind, so you struggle through several paragraphs of closely-reasoned text to get no farther than you would have if you just simply asserted “God exists,” and stopped right there.
This is not a criticism of the argument; it’s an admission that you didn’t understand it. Every argument has an outcome in mind. That’s called the conclusion. The fact that Joe Carter’s arguing for a conclusion does not make his argument illegitimate. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that his argument is a teleological argument. As he said at the beginning of the third paragraph, “Teleological arguments are arguments from the order in the universe to the existence of God”. The way such arguments proceed is by reasoning from order to design to designer to God. Designs (and designers) have goals. The Greek term ‘telos’ means “goal”. Hence, his argument is a teleological argument.
There is a discussion about the nature of God worth having, but this isn’t it.
True. But the teleological argument is about the existence of God not the nature of God.
October 4th, 2010 | 10:33 pm
JB writes: It’s obvious we did not create ourselves, but it’s not obvious that “a power greater than ourselves that encompasses the dynamic nature of the universe” did. The only thing that’s obvious is that something else did. You need to back up the stronger claim with some evidence. In part, that’s what the teleological argument is trying to do.
Are you postulating that a power equal to or lesser than us created us? Or are you arguing for infinite, non-created existence?
JB writes: This is not a criticism of the argument; it’s an admission that you didn’t understand it.
I understood it just fine. I’m a longtime reader of Carl Sagan, Timothy Ferris, and Stephen Hawking. But the teleology I would invoke is that this argument supports the weak anthropic principle (since we are here to observe the universe, then obviously the universe is constructed just so to allow for us to be here to observe it; no cause and effect is implied), but I firmly reject the strong anthropic principle (we actively create the universe through our observation and interaction with it).
JB writes: Every argument has an outcome in mind. That’s called the conclusion.
Yes, but the point of having a discussion at all is to expand one’s frame of reference, and learn that there are alternate ways of viewing the nature of things. While Joe’s argument is cogent and well-reasoned, it has all been said before, and does nothing to advance the understanding of First Principles.
October 4th, 2010 | 10:44 pm
Another follow up to JB’s comment: It’s obvious we did not create ourselves, but it’s not obvious that “a power greater than ourselves that encompasses the dynamic nature of the universe” did. The only thing that’s obvious is that something else did. You need to back up the stronger claim with some evidence. In part, that’s what the teleological argument is trying to do.
Are you postulating that a power equal to or lesser than us created us? Or are you arguing for infinite, non-created existence? Or if a power greater that us did create us, but does not encompass the dynamic nature of the universe, then either God is less than the entire universe, or God did not create us. What precisely are you saying?
October 5th, 2010 | 6:12 am
Chris writes: “Design: the fallback explanation for the currently unexplainable.”
It is not the fallback explanation, it is the primary explanation. In fact, it is the primary explanation for the explainable as well. The explainable only pushes the envelope back one remove. The question of where it all came from remains.
To take it to its basics, I believe God causes the rain just like a stereotypical caveman. What’s changed, on the science side, is that we now have some idea how God does it.
I recently told a teenager that we currently believe that space is finite and curved in on itself. He immediately knew to ask, “What’s beyond that?” @Chris: When did you lose the imagination God gave you?
October 5th, 2010 | 8:19 am
I think that’s a little strong. Even Einstein asked, “What choice did God have in creating the universe?”
The fact that water freezes at the temperature it does, and the way it does, is vital for life to exist on Earth. But water freezes the way it does because of more fundamental properties – the nature of hydrogen and oxygen, and those in turn depend on the nature of electrons, protons, and neutrons, which depends on… etc.
We could imagine a world where everything was the same except water froze at 37 degrees Celsius… but you couldn’t actually have such a world. The nature of nuclear and electromagnetic forces would have to change too far to allow ‘everything else’ to remain the same.
Even in your list above, you can’t change the speed of light without changing many other things – other things that are on your list, like the “Electromagnetic force constant” and the “Ratio of electromagnetic force constant to gravitational force constant”.
So no, it’s not clear that you could have a coherent universe at all if fundamental constants were different. Until and unless we can run more than thought-experiments about it, we can’t know that.
October 5th, 2010 | 8:24 am
The other problem with the fine-tuning argument is the “life as we don’t know it” problem. A recent paper (no link on the web that I can find readily) varied more than one parameter at a time and found at least 40% of the ‘universes’ thus described had stars or starlike objects. That’s only one part of producing recognizable life, but it’s a big part.
So, if it’s possible to change the fundamental constants – if they aren’t actually related in more subtle ways we’re not yet aware of – then it’s still not established that life-promoting universes would be that unlikely.
None of the above proves that fine-tuning didn’t or couldn’t happen, of course. But that’s the point – at the moment, we really don’t know.
October 5th, 2010 | 10:18 am
Here is an admittedly amateur view of things. ;o)
I think the progress of science has been retarded by its being temporarily trapped in an “egomaniac” stage. Prior to the use of the scientific method, mankind assumed that God or other spirits were somehow directly, immediately responsible for all that we couldn’t explain. Then we learned — and this was indeed a significant achievement — that much of what we had formerly attributed to supernatural beings actually had a completely knowable, natural, mindless explanation. This resulted in modern science jumping to the conclusion that everything must have a knowable, natural, mindless explanation. They were way too impressed with themselves. It is one thing to give oneself a well deserved pat on the back. It is quite another to replace the deity with one’s self.
God has arranged things such that intelligent beings eventually realize they have been confronted with a puzzle. This puzzle consists of several parts. There is life and there is non-living matter. The next part of the puzzle is that it becomes apparent that there was non-living matter before there was life. Non-living matter, upon close examination, has no inherent, intrinsic ability to become living matter. Non-living matter always reaches some state of equilibrium and just “sits there,” so to speak, engaged in pretty much predictable, continuous, chemical or atomic reactions. The last part of the puzzle is that the range of events that can be expected to be generated by non-living matter is then very limited. That range simply does not include events or even a series of events that would mindlessly assemble non-living matter into a primitive life form.
Even if one is convinced that some series of mindless events could have brought about that first life form mindlessly, it is beyond rationality to believe that that spectacular accident included a functioning reproductive system in that first living organism. Remember, if the ability to reproduce isn’t included in it, when it dies the evolutionary project has to start all over again. It is one thing to believe, however absurd it is to believe it, that through some freakish series of events a functioning laptop might be mindlessly, accidentally assembled. It is beyond absurdity — it is insanity — to believe that accidental laptop would also have built into it the ability to manufacture more laptops.
We know how to build laptops. Knowing this, we could at least begin the project of determining how one might come about accidentally. We don’t know how to assemble a primitive reproducing life form from lifeless matter. We are nowhere near being able to do that. The technology is beyond us; it is to manufacturing laptops what manufacturing laptops is to building things with tinker toys. What one doesn’t even know a single way to produce intentionally, one has no basis for credibly proposing came about accidentally, much less proposing that that accident included self reproduction.
It will eventually occur to the “we will eventually find a mindless explanation for everything” crowd, that just as they can bring about events that could never have been brought about mindlessly, God must have brought about, either by pre-programming them into the Universe from the beginning, or by what appears to us as His intervention after the Universe began, the events required to assemble non-living matter into living beings. (I say “appears” to us as intervention after the Universe began because God exists outside of time and what appears to us as having happened “after the beginning” is not necessarily so for God, for Whom both past and future are immediately present.) They will then realize they were a little hasty in deciding there was a mindless explanation for everything, and science will finally continue on its merry, rational way.
October 5th, 2010 | 10:30 am
I would only caution that Hugh Ross is not the best source for these things. From what I have seen, he tends to list large numbers of anthropic coincidences or tunings that don’t seem in some cases to be carefully argued for. For example, numbers 4 and 14 on the above list are really exactly the same thing: the “fine structure constant” is the same thing as the “electromagnetic force constant”. Or consider number 7, the ratio of the number of protons to electrons. (This is essentially the statement that the universe is electrically neutral.) That is not much of a coincidence: it is basically guaranteed by conservation of electric charge, given certain reasonable assumptions about the early universe. So this is not really a ‘fine-tuning”. Or number 11: to a particle physicist such as myself, this one doesn’t make any sense at all. The speed of light compared to what? Fundamental physicists usually use “natural units” which make the speed of light equal to 1. Asking what things would be look like if the speed of light were different is like asking what things would be like if the number of degrees in a circle were not 360. The number of degrees in a circle says nothing about circles, but about how one is defining “degrees”. In a similar way, saying the speed of light is 300,000 km.sec is really saying how one is defining kilometers relative to seconds. So 11 is really meaningless. Or take number 25: can it really be proved that life requires fluorine? Perhaps life as it evolved on earth does, but that doesn’t mean that any life anywhere in the universe must make use of fluorine.
One could go on and on. This is the problem with Hugh Ross, when it comes to anthropic coincidences he goes for sheer numbers over quality. Many — maybe even most — of the examples he uses would not stand up to careful scrutiny. Other people (Martin Rees, Paul Davies, John Barrow) discuss these things more carefully.
October 5th, 2010 | 10:33 am
Oh, one more minor point – I certainly haven’t seen anyone do so on this blog, but I have seen young-Earth creationists simultaneously point to “extreme-fine-tuning” arguments and claim that radioactive dating might be invalid because fundamental properties like nuclear decay rates or the speed of light might have varied in the past.
Obviously at most one of those claims can be true, though. If life depends on extreme fine-tuning, then decay rates couldn’t have varied by a factor of a million or so…
October 5th, 2010 | 11:07 am
“That is not much of a coincidence: it is basically guaranteed by conservation of electric charge, given certain reasonable assumptions about the early universe.”
But aren’t those “reasonable assumptions” made because of what we know about the way things actually are? Aren’t you just saying, “This is not unlikely, because given what we have, it’s only reasonable?” But isn’t that Joe’s whole point — that if you start with “given what we have,” you’re already giving the whole game away?
October 5th, 2010 | 11:08 am
harry –
Current models of abiogenesis take the approach that some very simple self-replicating system got going (e.g. auto-catalyzing RNA, Cairns-Smith’s clay crystals, etc.) which then, via some form of mutation plus natural selection, grew increasingly complex.
Indeed, there may not have been a sharp dividing line between what we’d now term “an auto-catalyzing chemical reaction” and “an organism”. But reproduction (plus the occasional mutation) would have been present ‘from the beginning’.
Note that there’s no solid theory of abiogenesis right now, just suggestive hypotheses and interesting exploratory research. I wouldn’t teach abiogenesis in K-12 or undergrad science classes any more than I’d teach ID there…
October 5th, 2010 | 11:20 am
harry –
Well, everything we’ve explained so far does. Lots and lots of phenomena have moved from the “explained supernaturally” column to the “explained naturally” column, and I’m not aware of a single example of anything moving the other way. Like, ever.
People are, or course, free to opine that “surely [X] will never be explained naturally!”, but there’s been a lot of things that very smart people have made such pronouncements on before… and they’ve turned out to be wrong. (I call this Haldane’s Error after a particularly striking example.)
That’s not proof that natural explanations won’t run into hard limits at some point, but, well… I’ll wait until that actually happens.
October 5th, 2010 | 1:22 pm
Dear pentamom,
You make a very good point, but (as you’ll see) so do I.
To have an equal number of protons and electrons does require SOME condition to be satisfied — and that condition could be seen as “anthropic”. I am only saying that the condition involved is not particularly “improbable”. For example, suppose that the universe is “closed” (as it well may be),
meaning that it has a finite total volume. It turns out in that case that the universe MUST be electrically neutral — which in turn would imply that the number of protons (which have charge +1) must equal the number of electrons (which have charge -1). (I am ignoring the charged particles of other types that are around
because they are extremely few in number.)
At first glance, it seems like an fantastic coincidence that there are (almost) exactly the same number of protons and electrons so that they can mate up nicely to make neutral matter. But it turns out that it would be a consequence of the universe being “closed”, which is basically a 50-50 thing as far as we know.
Even if the universe is “open” rather than closed, the near neutrality of matter would guaranteed by something called “cosmic inflation”. And even without inflation, there are other not-at-all unlikely conditions that would guarantee it. In fact, it is quite hard to cook up scenarios where the universe has a net electrical charge — if indeed it is possible at all, which I am not sure about.
So: you are right that SOME condition has to be satisfied to give this nice result. But I am also right that the condition needed is a very weak one, and so not terribly effective as an argument for design.
Excellent point, anyway.
Steve Barr
October 5th, 2010 | 1:37 pm
Ray Ingles makes some very good points in his 8:19 AM comment.
He is absolutely right that we cannot be sure which parameters of nature are “free parameters” (i.e. allowed to take various values consistently with fundamental principles). Within the context of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, for instance, one cannot just “change” the strength of the strong interactions without changing other things at the same time. Various things are tied together. So one has to be careful how one argues.
Anyone who wants to see a careful consideration of these issues, which takes account of the strongest arguments on both sides and doesn’t try to claim too much, can find one in my book “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”. For a shorter discussion along the same lines, see my article a few years ago in First Things called “Anthropic Coincidences”.
The brief answer to Ray Ingles’s (excellent) point is that, while within a particular framework (e.g. the Standard Model, or grand unified theories, or superstrings) certain things have to be a particular way, the framework itself could be different. The key point was made by Carr and Rees in a famous review article in Reviews of Modern Physics. They noted (and I am paraphrasing from memory) that even if many of the numerical conditions required for life were found to be forced upon one by some unified theory of physics, it would remain a remarkable coincidence that the very set of conditions that were needed for life happened also to be the very set of conditions imposed by the unified theory.
Steve Barr
October 5th, 2010 | 1:50 pm
“Well, everything we’ve explained so far does. Lots and lots of phenomena have moved from the “explained supernaturally” column to the “explained naturally” column, and I’m not aware of a single example of anything moving the other way. Like, ever.”
Mr. Ingles, you make harry’s point for him. How much is “everything we’ve explained”? How much is left to “explain”? We learn a little bit about the how of things and think we have the answer. We lose sight of the everyday miracles, for example, that physical laws even exist for us to discover.
October 5th, 2010 | 2:05 pm
Stephen Barr’s comments raise the question: why is Joe Carter posting on this when Barr writes here as well? Not that arguments are property of particular people or disciplines, but I’m confused about the target audience of Mr. Carter’s philosophical posts in general. They tend to be neither fish nor fowl – not rigorously formulated enough to stand up in a the discussion among philosophers, but still full of the style of rigorous analytic philosophy. Stylistically daunting and logically informal – not an ideal combination. Can First Things not get some guest posts from Alex Pruss or someone of that description, if that’s the kind of thing they want to feature on the blog?
October 5th, 2010 | 2:08 pm
Dear Ray Ingles,
While many people throughout history have ascribed many perfectly natural phenomena to supernatural causes, it is a myth that the Church has been in the business of doing so. Even in the Galileo case, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic theory that the religious establishment favored was a completely naturalistic one, proposed originally by Greeks who were pagans and did not believe in a creator God.
The Christian and Jewish view (in contrast to the pagan view) was that God is outside of nature. He is the Author and Lawgiver of nature. This view is found in the Bible and early Christian writings, which generally point to NATURAL phenomena as evidence of the existence of God. For instance, Minucius Felix ca. 200 AD spoke of the “providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth” as pointing to a rational Author of the universe.
The medievals called science “NATURAL philosophy” and it was taught in medieval universities as a prerequisite to the study of theology. They had no trouble with the idea that natural phenomena have natural causes. Indeed, one finds the medieval scientists and theologians saying that one should try to explain new and puzzling phenomena by seeking “appropriate natural causes” and criticizing uneducated folk for always seeing supernatural explanations for them.
What the Christian faith (and as a Catholic I have Catholic doctrine principally in mind) sees as supernatural, i.e. “above nature”, are God; the angels (who are taught to be pure intelligences, rather than physical beings); the human “spiritual soul” with its “spiritual powers” of rationality and freedom; “grace”, which is God acting on the human soul; and so forth. The natural world, on the other hand, is seen as exactly that: natural, obeying the natural laws that a wise and intelligent Lawgiver has given to it.
Christians do not expect natural phenomena to be given supernatural explanations. True, the Church believes in miracles. But miracles are, by definition, extraordinary one-off exceptions
to the rule of nature: they would not be extraordinary or miraculous unless there were an ordinary rule or law of nature that they contravened. We think there no contradiction between saying that God gave laws to nature and that he also in extraordinary circumstances suspends those laws.
I should also note that most of the great scientists from the time of Copernicus until about 150 years ago were religious and saw the lawfulness of nature as evidence FOR God and not AGAINST God. That includes Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and many others (Faraday and Maxwell were the two greatest physicists of the nineteenth century).
Nature religions explained natural phenomena by invoking gods and occult forces: lightening bolts as the weapons of Zeus, volcanos as due to the workshop of Vulcan, storms at sea as the wrath of Poseidon, etc. But Jews and Christians, by saying that God is outside of nature, stripped nature of the supernatural to a large extent. For example, scholars agree that the Book of Genesis made a point of the sun and moon being mere “lamps” placed in the sky by God to counteract the circumambient pagan religions that worshipped the sun and moon as gods. Nature was not divine in itself, but merely reflected the wisdom of the divine being who created it.
So, yes, the “God of the gaps” is a terrible (and highly untraditional) approach.
Steve Barr
October 5th, 2010 | 3:40 pm
Dear Joe Z, I don’t see why Joe Carter shouldn’t say what he thinks on these subjects. He might have his own take on them. I sometimes post on purely theological subjects here (like the morality of the death penalty, how much authority papal encyclicals have, etc.) even though my area of expertise is science and there are real theologians at First Things. I am the only natural scientist who writes regularly for FT; but it would be pretty boring if I were the only one who posted here on those subjects — and since I have my own slant on them, it might make the site one-sided.
October 5th, 2010 | 4:49 pm
Dr. Barr –
I, er, never claimed the Church was in that business, so your point seems a little misaimed. I quite agree that there’s been a strong strain of separation of the supernatural and the natural in the Church… but that’s hardly been the only strain of thought, and many of the scientists you list did, in fact, allow their faith to interfere with their science: http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2005/11/01/the-perimeter-of-ignorance
And even in the case of lightning, the Church’s boundaries were somewhat porous. Quite a few bell-ringers died trying to ward off lightning storms by ringing church bells. Even in post-medieval times, gunpowder was frequently stored in churches, since God wouldn’t strike a church (the tallest building in town, with ungrounded metal on top) with lightning, right? Opposition to lightning rods as hubristic was common early on; the destruction of the city of Brescia when lightning struck the Church of San Navaro in 1769 went a long way to counteracting that opposition.
October 5th, 2010 | 4:51 pm
@JoeZ, I don’t know about you but I know I am not a philosopher, just someone anxious to learn in the push and pull of the exchanges here. I learn quite a bit from JoeC, though I don’t agree with him on everything.
October 5th, 2010 | 6:57 pm
My remark was too territorial, I suppose. I certainly don’t want FT to institute a policy, even an informal policy, of restricting writers to their areas of greatest expertise. My apologies for the suggestion, which was inapt, intemperate and ill-considered.
I do still have a quibble with some of the characteristics of Mr. Carter’s posts – they are explicitly drawing on a certain segment of the literature in academic philosophy, but with less scrupulous attention to rigor. That’s fine, and I am glad to be corrected by Mike Melendez as to their being appropriately pitched to an audience, but they typically also contain strong statements about what claims can possibly be taken seriously by any rational person. I submit that such claims are not appropriate in the course of posts that are, essentially, simplified versions of arguments in philosophical literature that are, in that literature, disputed vigorously.
This is not to say that everything advanced somewhere in peer-reviewed print has to be taken seriously – but, for example, when a post advances a less detailed and careful formulation of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, and in the post Mr. Carter makes far stronger claims than Plantinga does, something is amiss, or at least something more needs to be said. If an informal and incomplete sketch of the argument is so powerful, why is Plantinga, when expounding it in detail, so much more circumspect about its force?
October 6th, 2010 | 12:01 am
Stephen M. Barr I would only caution that Hugh Ross is not the best source for these things.
I was hesitant to refer to Ross, but I thought he’d provide accurate info on that point. I replaced that part.
Mike Melendez I learn quite a bit from JoeC, though I don’t agree with him on everything.
Thanks, Mike. That sounds like something my wife would say (except the part about learning from me).
Joe Z If an informal and incomplete sketch of the argument is so powerful, why is Plantinga, when expounding it in detail, so much more circumspect about its force?
That’s a fair question. I think the reason is that Plantinga and a I have very different roles that lead us to make claims in very different ways.
I suspect that if you were having a beer with Plantinga and asked him off the record, he’d admit that the thought his argument was air-tight, forceful, and even a bit obvious. But he’s a professional philosopher so he has to play by the rules of the game set by his colleagues. He has to be collegial and temperate in his claims so that he will be taken seriously by his colleagues.
In contrast, I am a polemicist and rhetorician. I don’t have to pretend that I have doubts about issues that I don’t really have doubts about. I don’t mind being wrong; but it doesn’t pay to be wishy-washy. ; )
October 6th, 2010 | 10:50 am
Dear Ray, I looked at the link showing that the scientists I mentioned sometimes allowed their religion to “interfere” with their scientific work. The fact that Newton thought the solar system was unstable and needed to be stabilized by divine intervention is, of course, very well known. Saying that this is an example of his religion “interfering” with his science is quite a stretch.
There is a lot of mythology about the Church and lightening rods, which is repeated endlessly without much documentation to back it up. It is sometimes said that Christians did not want lightening rods put on houses, because they thought lightening killing people was divine punishment and it would be irreligious to interfere with that. This is extremely implausible. They also saw disease and death as sometimes being punishment for sin, but it didn’t stop them from seeking medical help. It is true that there was widespread opposition to lightening rods, but much of it was due to the fact that many people believed (not without reason) that lightening rods actually increased the chances of a building being struck by lightening.
It is extremely unlikely that most people thought churches would be spared lightening strikes by virtue of their sacred purpose, considering that churches were by far more likely to be struck by lightening than other structures (as they were usually by far the tallest structures in villages and towns at that time and had pointy spires). People were surely aware of that. It is not the kind of fact that would go long unnoticed. One should take these colorful stories of conflict between religious and scientific beliefs with a grain of salt. Many of them have been exploded by serious historical research.
October 6th, 2010 | 12:00 pm
Hi, Ray,
“That’s not proof that natural explanations won’t run into hard limits at some point, but, well… I’ll wait until that actually happens.”
Some people will never believe hard limits have been run into. Some people believe it has always been self-evident that a Supreme Being brought about the Universe. I am one of the latter. That no amount evidence will ever be good enough for the former is demonstrated by their refusal to consider the obvious implications of the discovery that embedded in the DNA molecule are digitally encoded instructions for building the various protein machines in the cell. They seem to think that a virtual impossibility, if divided up into many small, incremental steps taking place over a long period of time, becomes possible. I suppose they would be right if the Universe had no beginning and we had an infinite amount of time to work with. As it is we only have about 15 billion years to work with, which imposes severe limits on the amount of complex functionality that can be arrived at mindlessly.
That “anything can happen in 15 billion years” is a very common misconception. Actually, in terms of arriving at complex functionality mindlessly, not much at all can happen. To get an idea of how we tend to grossly over-estimate what is possible when we only have a few billion of years to work with, consider the following imaginary scenario:
The Universe consists of a computer with an operating system. In this imaginary Universe, far from the unbelievable complexity of even the most primitive life forms on Earth, “life” is extremely simple. A primitive life form (a very simple executable program) can be arrived at by coming up with the one correct sequence of bits among those possible in twelve eight-bit bytes, as opposed to the megabytes of information required for life on Earth. To simulate “events” in our fantasy Universe, so it is possible for life to come about, we assume there is a built-in random number generator. Take a guess at how long it would take for the random number generator to generate the one correct sequence of bits that would make twelve bytes a simple executable (our life form) instead of a meaningless, non-functional bit stream. Let the random number generator take a crack at it, say, every 250 milliseconds, and let it generate the entire twelve byte sequence every time. For many people, after doing the math, they realize their initial guess at the amount of time it would take was way too small. Not that this exercise proves anything scientifically, it just demonstrates how we tend to make gross over-estimations as to what is possible given a mere 15 billion years to work with, considering that life requires getting megabytes of information right, not a mere twelve bytes.
October 6th, 2010 | 4:02 pm
Harry –
It’s kind of ironic that you’d use that example on me, since I’ve actually dabbled in artificial life with just that kind of scenario. My results didn’t convince me that was impossible… far from it: http://ingles.homeunix.net/software/minev/intro.html
You might also find this interesting: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/Groups/AI/areas/alife/systems/psoup/0.html
October 6th, 2010 | 7:39 pm
Hi, Ray,
The problem with software that seeks to demonstrate that life could have come about mindlessly is that it doesn’t really demonstrate that at all. Just as soon as the process logic, based upon an examination of the ongoing results of the process, takes an action that alters the ongoing results of the process, it ceases to be a demonstration of what happens mindlessly and becomes a demonstration of the programmer’s intelligence. Not only that, the computer hardware, operating system and the utility company’s equipment, a connection to which is required for the computer to function – in other words, a very extensive, complex, intelligently designed environment – was required for the intelligently designed process to have a context in which to meaningfully execute. While many claims could legitimately be made based on the results of such software, that they demonstrate the creative power of mindlessness isn’t one of them.
I think the analogy I provided is more meaningful. If one bothered to do the math one found that it would take all the time in over 40 billion 15-billion-year-old Universes just to go through all the possible bit configurations in twelve bytes one time, trying one every 250 milliseconds. So, with average luck, it would take all the time in 20 billion 15-billion-year-old Universes to come up with our simple, twelve byte “life form.” That result doesn’t exactly fill one with hope about the likelihood of coming up with megabytes of correctly configured information required for life in the real Universe.
Let’s contrast the difficulty of coming up with “life” in our imaginary Universe with that of coming up with a realistic life form.
Our imaginary Universe never tries the same bit configuration twice. A Universe with only mindless processes, for the most part, is going to repeatedly generate the same events, most of which, if not all of which, have no potential whatsoever to configure lifeless matter into a life form, or do anything as complex as properly embedding the necessary logic in the DNA molecule, or anything like that.
The imaginary Universe tries out all possible events, which also isn’t going to happen in a strictly mindless Universe.
The imaginary Universe took for granted the existence of an environment that provided a context in which the simple “life form” could meaningfully execute. A Universe in which mindlessness reigns, besides having to get lucky in coming up with massive amounts of information, not just twelve bytes worth, has to also accidentally come up with an environment capable of supporting life, which is probably far more unlikely than accidentally coming up with the life form itself.
Then there is the matter of attempting to “create life” once every 250 milliseconds. We don’t know of a single event that occurs naturally which could potentially stir up lifeless matter into life. If there is such an event, we don’t know if it ever happened even once, so taking a crack at “creating life” every 250 milliseconds was a gross over simplification of the problem – and it still turned out to be highly unlikely that we would come up with even an unrealistically simple “life form” in our imaginary Universe.
We know, as I pointed out before, that lifeless matter tends to reach some state of equilibrium and just “sit there,” so to speak, engaged in pretty much predictable, continuous reactions, none of which are going to assemble lifeless matter into a life form. Knowing this full well, modern science postulates, sometimes at least theoretically possible, sometimes silly, sequences of events that might have taken place in past, currently non-existing environments that just might have once existed, that just might have, incrementally, over a very long period of time, assembled lifeless matter into a primitive life form. Pardon me, but that strikes me as being very strained and very far fetched. It is like insisting that it will eventually be determined that a functioning laptop could come about mindlessly, simply because, for whatever reason, one desperately hopes that that is possible.
I am not opposed to making the effort to figure out how the astoundingly complex functionality found in the simplest life forms might have come about mindlessly, it is just that it seems to me that the assertion that it is far more likely that some intelligent agent is acting behind the scenes in all of this rather than life being the product of mindlessness is entirely reasonable. Modern, materialistic science seems very reluctant to consider that, much less admit it. Intelligence is a reality. It is therefore legitimate for science to consider it as the possible cause of a given phenomenon.
October 6th, 2010 | 11:12 pm
Dr.Barr –
The point was that he, like others, reached something he didn’t understand, and stopped trying to understand it. It took LaPlace (of the possibly-apocryphal “I had no need of that hypothesis”) to push beyond that. My name for this is Haldane’s Error: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html
Look up Herman Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man”.
Google the phrase “Fulgura frango”.
October 7th, 2010 | 8:02 am
Harry –
And that’s the beauty of Tierra-style simulations – the ‘process logic’ doesn’t do any selection. The ‘organisms’ either survive and reproduce, or don’t. There’s no ‘fitness function’ beyond brute survival.
I know that the results I saw in my reimplementation weren’t ‘programmed in’ because I wrote the code myself, from scratch. The process ‘invented’ at least two novel tricks I didn’t anticipate – indeed, that I didn’t even understand at first.
At the nearby science museum, there’s a tornado simulator. Hit the button, get a vortex. The fans and motors that make this happen were intelligently designed, so we can conclude that every tornado is the result of deliberate intelligent action, right? We can use a computer to simulate earthquakes in fine detail, so obviously earthquakes are intelligently designed.
Or, maybe, the details of how things are simulated matter…
Calling that a ‘Universe’ is highly misleading, though, as what you’ve described is about as complex as a 1980′s programmable calculator. Out galaxy alone contains ~100 billion stars, and if recent research is any guide, several times that many planets. Planets have a lot more chemistry going on than 12 bits at a time.
Even if we assume the vast majority of planets don’t work for life, ten billion potential planets in the entire known universe – ten in each galaxy – carrying on a lot more than 12 bits of chemistry, doesn’t seem so much of a stretch.
Laptops don’t reproduce themselves with occasional errors, so the analogy doesn’t hold. We have good evidence that systems with those properties can add complexity ‘mindlessly’
October 7th, 2010 | 4:28 pm
Hi, Ray,
You wrote:
And how did these organisms with the ability to reproduce come into being? Mindlessly?
You wrote:
Those inventions were not the product of mindlessness, but the inevitable result of intelligently created process logic, even if those particular results were not foreseen. That you didn’t intend those results doesn’t undo the deterministic nature of the enterprise. You got those results because their inevitable production was embedded, however obscurely, in the logic that brought them about.
You wrote:
We can certainly conclude that the conditions required for a vortex to come about are understood by those who designed the simulator. That is very cool. If one believes the Universe had an omniscient creator, one believes that He knew He had set things up such that tornadoes and earthquakes would occasionally take place. In that sense tornadoes and earthquakes would be intelligently designed. Where people go wrong is in claiming they know God’s intentions for a particular tornado or earthquake, as in claiming they are a demonstration of the “wrath of God.” or that they are an indication that, if He is there, He must not really care about us because of the human suffering that was brought about, and so on.
You wrote:
Given enough chemistry over enough time anything can happen – that is the assumption. My point is that we only have 15 billion years to work with, and none of the naturally occurring events we know of have the potential to assemble lifeless matter into a life form. The ubiquitous occurrence of chemical reactions that have no potential whatsoever to assemble lifeless matter into a life form do not make it more likely that that will happen. That is why we have to search for a very peculiar scenario, a combination of events, or chemical reactions if you will, that incrementally, cumulatively, over a period of time, taking place in just the right environment, might have finally resulted in the assembly of a reproducing life form. It is far more likely that an environment making this possible would have been intelligently brought about than that we just got miraculously lucky. My analogy and commentary was to point out that we tend to grossly under-estimate how unlikely it is that life, and a scenario that would produce it, could come about mindlessly.
Let’s say the practice of dumping truckloads of Scrabble pieces on empty parking lots was ubiquitous. To make an unrealistic example even sillier, trusting it will still make my point, let’s say this had been going on for billions of years on planets all over the Universe. If you found an intriguing mystery novel spelled out on a parking lot, wouldn’t you just assume the involvement of an intelligent agent was a more likely explanation for this than that it happened completely mindlessly? Sure, given the fact that dumping out Scrabble pieces on parking lots was taking place all the time, this particular arrangement might have been unintended and mindless, but what is the more likely explanation? That an intelligent agent was involved in the creation of any scenario which brought about the assembly of a life form is also, by far, the more likely explanation.
You wrote:
That increasing the complexity of functionality requires an intelligent agent arranging things such that that can take place has been clearly demonstrated. This was accomplished with the use of intelligently designed software that required an intelligently created environment in which to execute. Regardless of claims to the contrary, there has been no demonstration of the mindless creation of complex functionality. We don’t yet have any reason to believe that complex biological functionality comes about mindlessly. If it comes about through a biological process, it is as likely that that process, along with the environment that enabled it to execute, came about mindlessly as it is that the software you wrote, and the environment required for it to execute, came about mindlessly.
I think the laptop analogy holds in terms of complex functionality. Right, laptops don’t reproduce – they are less complex than primitive life forms, and are therefore more likely than life forms to come about mindlessly. What IS most likely, if there was nothing programmed in from the beginning to bring about something else, is that lifeless matter would have just remained lifeless matter. Exactly what is the reason we should think otherwise? “Life exists.” is not the answer. “Life exists?” is the question. Why should there be life? Why didn’t the Universe spew forth laptops instead of life? If one insists here that laptops just don’t come about mindlessly, that is precisely my point. It should be even more apparent that the much more advanced technology required for life isn’t going to come about mindlessly, either.
October 7th, 2010 | 9:48 pm
Mike Melendez: “To take it to its basics, I believe God causes the rain just like a stereotypical caveman. What’s changed, on the science side, is that we now have some idea how God does it.”
If a stereotypical caveman was given the knowledge of science, he would understand that the rain is a purely natural phenomenon that doesn’t require the “God did it” explanation.
Apparently, you lag behind a stereotypical caveman in the evolution of human intelligence.
October 7th, 2010 | 11:53 pm
Mike Melendez wrote:
Jake Max wrote:
I’m with Mike and the caveman. If the caveman was given the knowledge of science, and then understood that rain is a natural phenomenon, that not mean he would reject the “God did it” explanation since he knows intuitively that God is the author of nature. Nature proclaims, and was created to proclaim, that “God did it.” That has been self evident to most of humanity for most of its history, the exception being modern day militant atheism, which is a devolution of human intelligence. It is an aberration that will fade away as suddenly as it came about. This is inevitable, since the more science learns about the astounding complexity of life the more absurd it becomes to insist that it came about mindlessly.
October 8th, 2010 | 8:25 am
harry – “modern day militant atheism”
Pet peeve alert. Define exactly what you mean by ‘militant’.
In my experience, you actually have to pick up a gun and kill somebody to be considered a ‘militant’ believer, but all you have to do to be considered a ‘militant’ atheist is write a book.
Call it ‘aggressive’, ‘strident’, ‘rude’, ‘impassioned’, ‘outspoken’, ‘politically active’, or what have you. Don’t tar atheists who specifically decry violence with a term that’s otherwise reserved for terrorists.
October 8th, 2010 | 8:49 am
Harry –
Read the second link I gave you.
No. There are two distinct propositions here, and you are conflating them.
Proposition one: Under some circumstances, complex functionality can arise and improve without intelligent management and guidance. I’ve demonstrated that myself to my satisfaction
(This itself is a surprising and counterintuitive result, and hasn’t been clear through most of history. E.g. snowflakes had to be crafted by God and distributed from storehouses, Job 38:22. It’s been going like this for a while. The weather used to be directly organized by god(s), now it’s ‘part of the system’. The light of the sun, the orbits of the planets, the healing of injuries, etc. etc. The need for direct intervention has been receding in all directions every time we look.)
Now, you further contend – proposition two – that those circumstances can only come about via intelligent action. There are two problems with this.
First, there’s the problem of infinite regress. If intelligence is necessary to engender all complexity, and intelligence itself is complex, then it’s nonterminating. Who intelligently arranged God? At some point you have to switch to a different kind of explanation.
But even ignoring the philosophical issues, it’s not practically established that only intelligent action can give rise to the circumstances. You discount – apparently out of hand – any attempt to investigate abiogenesis. The models you use are flawed. You say that “Non-living matter always reaches some state of equilibrium” when our Earth and solar system are very definitely not in equilibrium. You propose thought-experiments like:
…and want an entire novel to be spelled out in one step. If we’re going to represent the model that people investigating this actually use remotely fairly, we have to look for a single coherent sentence to emerge. And then, the coherent sentence can bootstrap to a full novel.
If these are the models you’re using to try to understand how others think, I’m not surprised you’re so confused about ‘how anyone could believe that’. The answer is, they don’t.
October 8th, 2010 | 9:02 am
Hi, Ray,
You, my friend, are a very enjoyable atheist, or agnostic, which ever you consider yourself to be. Sorry if you are neither and I have totally misjudged you.
You are enjoyable because you engage in civil, interesting discussion instead of making comments like:
“Apparently, you lag behind a stereotypical caveman in the evolution of human intelligence.”
Anyway, “militant atheist,” as the term is typically used, does not refer to terrorist violence, and was not what I had in mind when I used the term.
October 8th, 2010 | 10:34 am
Hi, Ray,
You wrote: “You discount – apparently out of hand – any attempt to investigate abiogenesis.”
I probably have a typical lay person’s knowledge of abiogenesis. I have read Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, which covers the various theories of abiogenesis, and have followed the discussion on various blogs and web sites for years.
Richard Dawkins wrote, “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.”
Carl Sagan wrote: “The information content of a simple cell has been established as around 10^12 [a trillion] bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
Considering the above, along with the fact that more and more similarities between modern information processing and communications systems and the functionality of the cell are continually discovered, and that life is still technology that is way beyond anything we know how to construct, forgive me for thinking abiogenesis is engaged in an impossible quest as long as it rules out intelligence as a factor in the explanation of how life came about.
You wrote: “[You] want an entire novel to be spelled out in one step. If we’re going to represent the model that people investigating this actually use remotely fairly, we have to look for a single coherent sentence to emerge. And then, the coherent sentence can bootstrap to a full novel.
If these are the models you’re using to try to understand how others think, I’m not surprised you’re so confused about ‘how anyone could believe that’. The answer is, they don’t.”
I have acknowledged several times that the processes that might mindlessly bring about life would have to do so incrementally. The point I was making was that expecting an environment that would facilitate the accidental, incremental construction of a life form to come about mindlessly is like expecting a novel to be mindlessly composed.
Instead of admitting that life coming about accidentally, like a laptop coming about accidentally, is a virtual impossibility, materialistic science applied the Darwinian “well, it could all happen mindlessly if it is done incrementally over a long period of time” — which is reasonable after life begins — to life getting started. Well, for life to get started that way, you need an appropriate environment, which as likely to come about mindlessly as is the environment required for software to execute that “proves” that mindless construction of complex functionality is possible. When that sinks in, they will, no doubt, be working on figuring out how such an environment came about incrementally, in very small steps.
At some point it will become obvious to most thinking people that materialistic abiogenesis is no longer a matter of objective, “follow the evidence wherever it leads” science, but a matter of an irrational defense of atheism.
October 9th, 2010 | 10:44 pm
Harry –
Right, that’s not the typical usage. For every other religion, ‘militant’ means ‘violent’. (Do a Google news search if you don’t believe me.) For atheists, it means… ‘public’. Or ‘impolite’. Or ‘not as respectful as I think they should be’.
So far as I can see, it’s intended – at least subconsciously – to be a sneer. ‘Militant atheist’ just means – in practice – ‘an atheist I disapprove of’.
October 9th, 2010 | 11:14 pm
Harry –
Then you’re aware that quite a few people think Meyer’s misrepresents or ignores important factors in abiogenesis. (Not to mention misrepresents the math, particularly information theory.)
I note that you talk about how complex cells are (and bring up quotes about it)… but the point of abiogenesis is that the first steps would not be anything like as complex as a modern-day cells. You still want a novel in one step.
Well, so you say. The people who keep looking keep finding new, interesting things. Like how as water freezes, it concentrates chemicals and produces long chains of amino acids. And as it thaws, it allows those chemicals to mix again. And if frozen again, new mixes occur…
Repeated freezing and thawing cycles need intelligent intervention to arrange, of course. They don’t happen on Earth by themselves, that’s for sure!
October 10th, 2010 | 8:48 pm
Hi, Ray,
You wrote:
I would appreciate it if you would provide me with specific examples of refutations of Meyer and his rebuttals.
You wrote:
Is there any such thing as a simple version of life? What is the evidence for there having been a simplified version of life, which, if it was really life, had the significant complexity required for metabolism and reproduction? It seems to me you either have metabolism and reproduction or you don’t.
As for getting there incrementally, can you give me some examples of naturally found instances of cell-like units of chemical reactions that are half way to metabolism and reproduction? Or three quarters of the way there? Do we know of any such instances? It looks to me like it is a matter of having arrived at metabolism and reproduction or being nowhere near it.
Consider the following excerpt from a University of California at San Diego web site:
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/litu/02_3.shtml
Stanley Miller, of the famous Miller-Urey experiment, was a professor at UCSD for years.
Your software that “proves” complex functionality can be brought about mindlessly takes for granted the environment it requires, which includes a computer, an operating system, a compiler, utility company equipment, and so on. All of those things are intelligently designed. To just assume all this is in place and still maintain that your software demonstrates that complex functionality can come about mindlessly is the same as expecting a novel to have have come about mindlessly.
You need an environment that would make possible the incremental construction of the first life form – an environment as likely to come about mindlessly as one that would make possible the construction of a “modern automobile with GPS and onboard computer” from “bits and pieces of metal of various shapes.”
You wrote:
OK. Let’s say we find that the pieces of metal in the junk yard get rearranged continuously. Does that really get us any closer to that modern automobile?
October 11th, 2010 | 1:04 pm
http://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/10/stephen-meyers-bogus-information-theory.html
http://recursed.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-on-signature-in-cell.html
http://biologos.org/blog/signature-in-the-cell/
Look for individual chapters here: http://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/search/label/Book%20Reviews
As noted in some of the above links, we have been able to evolve self-replicating systems consisting of only RNA. ‘Metabolism’ as it exists today is not the key feature – reproduction, with occasional mistakes, is the key feature needed.
We do have some suggestions of remnants of earlier precursors to modern genetics – e.g. the fact that transcription of RNA to proteins is, to this day, carried out by a ribozyme.
Organic chemicals don’t lay around for long periods of time on Earth right now – we have too many modern living things scooping them up. (Even Darwin noted this: “But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, – light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”)
We haven’t had a few hundred million years to experiment with this stuff yet… but even in a few decades, we have found some suggestive results: http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice
Auto parts don’t reproduce. Chemicals can auto-catalyze. A key – in this case, the key – difference.
October 12th, 2010 | 8:55 am
Hi, Ray,
Nothing new in your links. Google up and download “Signature of Controversy.” There you will find rebuttals for the arguments made at the links you provided me. I will respond to your other points later. In the mean time, here is an excerpt from Signature of Controversy for you to ponder:
For obvious reasons, neither Shannon nor Kolmogorov information are useful metrics of functional biological information; a useful measure of biological information must take into account the function specified by the information. And despite Shallit’s vitriolic assertions to the contrary, he seems unaware that Meyer’s use of the term “specified complexity” (also called “complex and specified information,” or CSI) is supported by eminent scientists who are by no means “creationists.”
In a 1973 book cited by Meyer, The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection, leading origin-of-life theorist Leslie Orgel—a staunch materialist—described “specified complexity” as a hallmark of the information in living organisms:
When responding to Meyer’s recommendation that we measure biological information in terms of the specification necessary to perform some function, Shallit asserts, “This is pure gibberish. Information scientists do not speak about ‘specified information’ or ‘functional information.’” Again, Shallit must be unaware that leading scientists have used those very terms while simultaneously arguing that classical information theory is not useful for measuring biological information.
In 2003, Nobel Prize-winning origin-of-life researcher Jack Szostak wrote a review article in Nature lamenting that the problem with “classical information theory” is that it “does not consider the meaning of a message” and instead defines information “as simply that required to specify, store or transmit the string.” According to Szostak, “a new measure of information— functional information—is required” in order to take account of the ability of a given protein sequence to perform a given function. Some theorists are heeding Szostak’s call for better definitions of functional biological information. A 2007 paper in the journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling found that some measures of biological complexity are not “sufficient to describe the functional complexity observed in living organisms” and instead recommended measuring biological information through functional sequence complexity (FSC):
FSC includes the dimension of functionality. Szostak argued that neither Shannon’s original measure of uncertainty nor the mea- sure of algorithmic complexity are sufficient. Shannon’s classical information theory does not consider the meaning, or function, of a message. Algorithmic complexity fails to account for the observation that “different molecular structures may be functionally equivalent.” For this reason, Szostak suggested that a new measure of information— functional information—is required.
In 2007 Szostak co-published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with Carnegie Institution origin-of-life theorist Robert Hazen and other scientists, furthering these arguments. Attacking those like Shallit who insist on measuring biological complexity using the outmoded tools of classical information theory, the authors wrote, “A complexity metric is of little utility unless its conceptual framework and predictive power result in a deeper understanding of the behavior of complex systems.” Thus they “propose to measure the complexity of a system in terms of functional information, the information required to encode a specific function.”
October 14th, 2010 | 7:22 am
First off, you’re misrepresenting that quote of Shallit in two different ways.
Number one, that passage was not “responding to Meyer’s recommendation that we measure biological information in terms of the specification necessary to perform some function”. It was responding to a specific example of the ‘information content’ of two telephone numbers.
Number two, you dropped – without indication – the rest of the Shallit quote, which pointed out that Meyer flubs basic usage of terms in information theory: “…and as I have pointed out, ‘information-carrying capacity’ refers to a channel, not a string of digits.”)
But the main issue is that you missed Shallit’s central, take-home point. And it’s not like he hid this, he said explicitly:
Until and unless a mathematically rigorous definition of ‘biological information’ is produced, it’s not going to be possible to prove anything about it.
That’s its job. It’s supposed to put a lower bound, a minimum, on the complexity of the implementation of an algorithm.
Here’s a thought-problem related to algorithmic complexity. Read this (fascinating) article:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/braking-the-virus/
Now, do the slower viruses contain less ‘biological information’? Why or why not? Can you (or Meyer, or Szostak) quantify how much?
October 14th, 2010 | 11:08 pm
Hi, Ray,
The article, Braking the Virus, was fascinating. Thanks for that.
As for Shallit’s criticism of Dembski/Meyers, Here are some excerpts from an interview with William Dembski. The entire interview can be found here: http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1438
CA: Your critics (such as Wein, Perakh, Shallit, Elsberry, Wolpert and others) seem unsatisfied with your work. They charge your work as being somewhat esoteric and lacking intellectual rigor. What do you say to that charge?
WD: Most of these critics are responding to my book No Free Lunch. As I explained in the preface of that book, its aim was to provide enough technical details so that experts could fill in details, but enough exposition so that the general reader could grasp the essence of my project. The book seems to have succeeded with the general reader and with some experts, though mainly with those who were already well-disposed toward ID. In any case, it became clear after that publication of that book that I would need to fill in the mathematical details myself, something I have been doing right along (see my articles described under “mathematical foundations of intelligent design” at http://www.designinference.com) and which has now been taken up in earnest in a collaboration with my friend and Baylor colleague Robert Marks at his Evolutionary Informatics Lab (www.EvoInfo.org).
CA: Are you evading the tough questions?
WD: Of course not. But tough questions take time to answer, and I have been patiently answering them. I find it interesting now that I have started answering the critics’ questions with full mathematical rigor (see the publications page at http://www.EvoInfo.org) that they are largely silent. Jeff Shallit, for instance, when I informed him of some work of mine on the conservation of information told me that he refuse to address it because I had not adequately addressed his previous objections to my work, though the work on conservation of information about which I was informing him was precisely in response to his concerns. Likewise, I’ve interacted with Wolpert. Once I started filling in the mathematical details of my work, however, he fell silent.
CA: Are there any major universities supporting the work of ID proponents? If not, why not?
WD: Previously I would have said that universities don’t so much support ID as tolerate it if the faculty member doing ID research has tenure. But I can’t say that any longer. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab had a presence on the Baylor server until the work of the lab was linked to ID (there had been anonymous complaints), at which point the Baylor administration went into Marks’s webspace and, without his permission, removed the EIL site from his space on the Baylor server. For the whole sordid story, which gained national media attention and will be featured in the upcoming Ben Stein documentary (www.expelledthemovie.com), go to my blog Uncommon Descent (http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/media-coverage-baylor-robert-marks-and-the-evolutionary-informatics-lab/). Mind you, Robert Marks’s title is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering—he doesn’t just have tenure but he is (or was) a star professor at Baylor. In any case, Marks still remains at his university. Untenured faculty are not so fortunate. In the case of faculty members who support ID and don’t have tenure, most universities make sure that they don’t get tenure (the tenure denial of Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University is latest instance). Why this opposition? Darwinists have been very successful at demonizing anyone who dissents from their materialistic view of evolution. They have essentially established a Stalinist regime over the western academy.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Apparently Dembski thinks he has begun to address Shallit’s criticisms, and that Shallit has not acknowledged that. As for Demski’s remarks there at the end of the excerpt, it seems to me that establishment science has a real problem. It is discussed in a thoughtful article by Michael Crichton entitled Aliens Cause Global Warming, which can be seen here:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2097
I most certainly do not want to change the subject to global warming. What Crichton has to say about scientific consensus applies to the Intelligent Design debate as well as global warming.
I am not going to have time to continue this discussion. It has been very enjoyable. Before I sign off though, please give me your thoughts on the following.
I mentioned this earlier but you didn’t respond to that particular part of my post. (Neither have I responded to all the points in your posts.;o) Anyway, explain to me on what basis one can credibly propose that a phenomenon has been brought about mindlessly and accidentally if one does not even know a single way to bring it about intentionally. If we know what it takes to construct something, we can use what we know about chance and the laws of physics and determine if there is a scenario in which a series of naturally occurring events would mindlessly and incrementally bring about its construction. On what basis can we credibly propose life, which due to its astounding complexity we do not know even one way to bring about intentionally, came about mindlessly?
A final thought: Suppose we were on a planet in another galaxy, and nothing on it looked even vaguely familiar to things on Earth, as life had evolved there completely differently than here on Earth. At least we think the phenomena we observe there might be life. Suppose further that we do not recognize anything that appears to be intelligent life, yet we are wondering if that is just because everything is so different – for all we know, we are surrounded by intelligent life. We have an interest in determining if anything there was brought about by intelligent agents because we want to know if there is, or ever was, intelligent life on the planet. Anyway, by what rules would we determine which phenomena on the planet were brought about naturally, and which were brought about by intelligent agents? Based on what criteria would we propose that one phenomenon was brought about mindlessly and another brought about by intelligent agents? I have not given any details about what things look like on the planet because what I am after is the objective criteria, regardless of the phenomenon in question, for determining if it was brought about naturally or by an intelligent agent. What would that criteria be?
October 15th, 2010 | 11:43 am
Harry –
I’ve not been impressed by Dembski’s honesty before, particularly about Shallit, unfortunately. E.g. http://lippard.blogspot.com/2005/11/further-dembski-dishonesty-about.html
So, in the year 1632 – long before anyone was doing any experiments with electricity – could one credibly propose that lightning arose “mindlessly and accidentally”?
In terms of comparing origin-of-life research to electrical research, we’re closer to the late 1700s. We have lines of chemical, archaeological, and experimental evidence indicating that it may well be possible for life to bootstrap from nonliving materials.
You want an interesting thought-experiment, just read the “Prologue” of “Code of the Lifemaker” here:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265.htm
(Of course, some versions of ‘theistic evolution’ look a lot like this, come to think of it.)
To answer your question… we look for thermodynamically-unlikely artifacts, signals, or patterns that do not appear to result from self-replicated descent with modification.
The hallmark of life is reproduction, replication. At some point, reproduction happens. (E.g. most ants in a colony don’t reproduce, but reproduction does happen.) Alien life might reproduce in ways or at scales we might have trouble understanding or recognizing, but if it’s alive, reproduction happens somewhere in the ‘life cycle’.
Descent with modification has a hallmark – nested hierarchies. E.g. scribes copied books and made typos. Later copies have more typos. The copies can be put into a ‘family tree’ based on their typos. No controversy at all with books, even the Bible. This pattern is one strong indication of natural origin – it doesn’t take intelligent guidance of any kind to give rise to this pattern, it happens… well, naturally. (Few if any of those typos were intelligently inserted.)
Nonliving natural items and manufactured items (that don’t reproduce) don’t show this pattern. E.g. cars – they don’t form a neat nested-tree pattern of features; innovations and modifications jump willy-nilly from one model to another. Fun Fact: Linnaeus, who came up with the kingdom/phyla/genera/etc. system for classifying life, tried to do the same for minerals. It didn’t work, ’cause minerals don’t form from descent with modification.
Nonliving natural items tend to be thermodynamically ‘likely’. Living items tend to be thermodynamically unlikely, but reproduce, and show a pattern of descent with modification. Manufactured items tend to be thermodynamically unlikely, but don’t show the ‘nested hierarchy’ pattern of life.
The beings in “Code of the Lifemaker” would be an interesting mix. Much of their traits would fall into a nested-hierarchy model… but some of their fundamental ‘biology’ would not, would appear ‘manufactured’. They would have good reason believe in Intelligent Design. ID proponents on Earth are looking for similar traits in life here… but so far, their examples haven’t panned out.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact