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Review of “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith,” by Stephen Barr

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I recently came across the book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen Barr, a professor of physics at the University of Delaware. First published in 2003, the book was reprinted in 2013 by the University of Notre Dame press. I was initially skeptical of this book because reviews and praise for the book seemed to be limited mostly to religious and conservative publications. But after reading it, I have to say that the science in the book is solid, the author is reasonably open-minded, and the paucity of reviews of this book in scientific publications more likely reflects an unthinking prejudice rather than an informed judgment by scientists.

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is not one of those books that attempts to prove the existence of God scientifically, an impossible task in any event. The book does show that belief in God is reasonable, that faith is not wholly irrational. But the main theme of the book is a critique of “scientific materialism,” a philosophy that emerged out of the scientific findings of the nineteenth century. What is “scientific materialism”? Barr summarizes the viewpoint as follows:

‘The universe more and more appears to be a vast, cold, blind, and pur­poseless machine. For a while it appeared that some things might escape the iron grip of science and its laws —perhaps Life or Mind. But the processes of life are now known to be just chemical reactions, involving the same ele­ments and the same basic physical laws that govern the behavior of all matter. The mind itself is, according to the overwhelming consensus of cognitive scientists, completely explicable as the performance of the biochemical computer called the brain. There is nothing in principle that a mind does which an artificial machine could not do just as well or even better. . . .

‘There is no evidence of a spiritual realm, or that God or souls are real. In fact, even if there did exist anything of a spiritual nature, it could have no influence on the visible world, because the material world is a closed sys­tem of physical cause and effect. Nothing external to it could affect its opera­tions without violating the precise mathematical relationships imposed by the laws of physics. . . .

‘All, therefore, is matter: atoms in ceaseless, aimless motion. In the words of Democritus, everything consists of’atoms and the void.’ Because the ulti­mate reality is matter, there cannot be any cosmic purpose or meaning, for atoms have no purposes or goals. . . .

‘Science has dethroned man. Far from being the center of things, he is now seen to be a very peripheral figure indeed. . . .  The human species is just one branch on an ancient evolutionary tree, and not so very different from some of the other branches—genetically we overlap more than 98 percent with chimpanzees. We are the product not of purpose, but of chance mutations. Bertrand Russell perfectly summed up man’s place in the cosmos when he called him ‘a curious accident in a backwater.” (pp. 19-20)

A great many educated people subscribe to many or most of these principles of scientific materialism. However, as Barr notes, these principles are based largely on scientific findings from the nineteenth century, and there have been a number of major advances in knowledge since then that have cast doubt on the principles of materialism. Barr refers to these newer findings as “plot twists.”

The first plot twist Barr notes is the “Big Bang” theory of the origins of the universe, first proposed in 1927 by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and astronomer. Although taken for granted today, Lemaître’s idea of a universe emerging from a single, tiny point of concentrated energy was initially shocking and disturbing to many scientists. The predominant view of scientists for a number of centuries was that the universe existed eternally, with no beginning and no end. Even Einstein was disturbed by the Big Bang theory and thought it “abominable”; it took many years for him to accept it. I initially was skeptical of Barr’s claim that atheists and materialists were particularly disturbed by and opposed to the Big Bang, but a recent book on theories of the universe’s origins supports Barr’s claim (pp. 25-27).

Now it’s true that the Big Bang in itself doesn’t prove the existence of a creator. And there are many features of the universe which seem to argue against the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent creator, most prominently, the very gradual process of evolution, with its randomness and mass extinctions. Also, Georges Lemaître himself cautioned against any attempts to draw theological conclusions from his scientific work, and argued against the mixing of science and religion. Nevertheless, I don’t think it can be denied that the Big Bang is more compatible with the idea of a creator than the previously dominant theory of the eternal universe.

The second plot twist, according to Barr, is the gradual discovery of a deeper underlying harmony and beauty in the laws of physics, which suggest not blind and impersonal forces but a cosmic designer. Any one particular phenomenon can be explained by an impersonal law or mechanism, notes Barr; but when one looks at the structure of the universe as a whole, the question of a designer is “inescapable.” (Barr, p. 24) In addition, the story of the universe is not one of order emerging out of disorder or chaos, but rather order emerging out of a deeper order, rooted in mathematical structures and physical laws. Barr discusses a number of examples of this harmony and beauty, including symmetrical structures in nature, the growth of crystals, orbital ellipses, and particular mathematical equations that are simple yet also capable of resulting in highly complex orders.

I found this part of Barr’s book to be the least convincing. Symmetry in itself does not strike me as being particularly beautiful, though beautiful things may have symmetry as one of their properties. Furthermore, there are aspects of the universe that are definitely not beautiful, harmonious, or elegant, but rather messy, complicated, and wasteful. Elegance is something rightly valued by scientists, but there is no reason to believe that the underlying structure of nature is always fundamentally elegant, and scientists have sometimes been misguided into coming up with elegant solutions for phenomena that later turned out to be far messier and more complicated in reality. 

The third “plot twist” Barr discusses is, in my view, far more interesting and convincing: the discovery of “anthropic coincidences,” that is, features of the universe that suggest that the emergence of life, including intelligent life, is not an accident but is actually a predictable feature of the universe, built right into the structure. Barr accepts the theory of evolution and acknowledges that random mutations play a large role in the evolution of life (though he is skeptical that natural selection provides a complete explanation for the evolution of life). But Barr also argues that evolution proceeds from the foundation of a cosmic order which seems to be custom-made for the emergence of life. A good number of physical properties of the universe — the strong nuclear force, the creation of new elements through nuclear fusion, the stability of the proton, the strength of the electro-magnetic force, and other properties and processes — seem to be finely tuned to within a very narrow range of precision. Action outside the these strict boundaries of behavior set by the physical laws and constants of the universe would eliminate the possibility of life anywhere in the universe or even cause the universe to self-destruct. Again, these “anthropic coincidences” do not prove the existence of God, but they do seem to indicate that life is not just an accident of the universe, but an outcome built into the universe from the very beginning.

Barr acknowledges the argument of some physicists that the universe could well have different domains with different physical laws, or there could even be a large (or infinite) number of universes (the “multiverse”), each with a slightly different set of laws and constants. In this view, life only seems inevitable because we just happen to exist in a universe that has the right balance of laws and constants, and if the universe did not have this balance, no one would be there to observe that fact! But Barr is rightly skeptical of this argument, noting that it relies merely upon speculation, with no actual empirical evidence of other universes. If belief in God is unscientific because God is unobservable, then belief in an unobservable multiverse is also unscientific.

Barr devotes most of the remaining chapters of his book to refuting the scientific materialist view of humanity. In the materialist view, human beings are nothing more than biological mechanisms, made up of the same atoms that make up the rest of the universe, and therefore as determined and predictable as any other object in the universe. Humans have no soul apart from the body, no mind apart from the brain, and no real free will. Therefore, there is no reason to expect that artificial intelligence in advanced computers will be any different from human minds, aside from being superior. Barr rightly criticizes this view as the fallacy of reductionism, the notion that everything can be explained by reference to the parts that compose it. The problem with this view, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is that when parts join together, the resulting whole may be an entirely new phenomenon, with radically different properties from the parts.

Barr argues that although human beings may be made of materials, humans beings also have a spiritual side, defined as the possession of two crucial attributes: (1) an intellect capable of understanding; and (2) free will. As such, human beings are capable of transcending themselves, that is, go beyond their immediate desires and appetites, “perceive what is objectively true and beautiful,” (p. 168) and to freely choose good or evil.

It is precisely this quality of human beings that makes humans different from material objects, including computers. Barr points out that a computer can manipulate numbers and symbols, and do so much more quickly and efficiently than humans. But, he asks, in what way does a computer actually understand what it is doing? When you use a computer to calculate the sum of all annual profits for Corporation X, does the computer have any idea of what it is really doing? No — it is manipulating numbers and symbols, for the benefit of human beings who actually do have understanding. Likewise, the very notion of moral judgment and blame makes no sense when applied to a computer, because in practice we know that a computer does not have real understanding. In Barr’s words:

We do not really ‘blame’ a computer program for what it does; if anything, we blame its human programmers. We do not condemn a man-eating tiger, in the moral sense, or grow indignant at the typhoid bacillus. And yet we do feel that human beings can ‘deserve’ and that their behavior can be morally judged. We believe this precisely because we believe that human beings can make free choices. (p. 186)

More importantly, as Barr notes, the scientific materialist view of human beings as nothing more than machines is derived from scientific findings in earlier centuries, when scientists became increasingly capable of predicting the motions and actions of objects, large and small. Since human beings were nothing more than collections of material objects known as atoms, it stood to reason that human beings were also nothing more than predictable and determined in their actions. But early twentieth century research into the behavior of subatomic particles, known as “quantum physics,” overturned the view that the behavior of all objects could be predicted on the basis of predetermined laws of behavior. Rather, at the subatomic level, the behavior of objects were probabilistic, not determined; furthermore, the behavior of the particles could not be known until they interacted with an observer!

Today, it is widely acknowledged among scientists that the nineteenth century dream of a completely determined and predictable universe is an illusion, that the behavior of large solar, planetary, and sub-planetary bodies can be predicted to a large extent, but that other phenomenon remain less amenable to such study. Yet the materialist view of human beings as completely determined remains popular among many, including scientists who should know better. Barr rightly criticizes this view, noting that while quantum physics doesn’t prove that humans have free will, it does demolish the notion of complete determinism, and at the very least, creates space for free will.

However, while Barr effectively demolishes the scientific materialist view of human nature, I don’t think he demonstrates that the traditional Judeo-Christian view is entirely correct either. In this view, human beings have a soul that exists, or can exist, separately from the body, and this soul is imparted to human beings by God in a special act of creation. (p. 225) But rather than surmise that there is a separate spirit that possesses the material body and gives it life and understanding and free will, I think it makes more sense to adopt the outlook of theorists of emergence, that the correct combination and organization of parts can lead to the emergence of a whole organism that possesses life and understanding and free will, even if the parts themselves do not possess these qualities.

Another way to look at this issue is to carefully reexamine the whole notion of what “matter” is. Materialists conceive of humans as beings composed of collections of objects called atoms and can’t conceive how this collection of objects can possibly have understanding and free will. But human beings are not just made up of objects — we are beings of matter and energy. Physicists have defined “energy” as the capacity to do work, and if you think of human beings as collections of matter and energy, the attributes of life and understanding and free will no longer seem so mysterious: these attributes are synergistic expressions of a highly complex matter/energy combination.

One could go even further. Physicists have long noted that matter and energy are interchangeable, that matter can be transformed into energy and energy can be transformed into matter. According to the great physicist Werner Heisenberg, “[E]xperiments have shown the complete mutability of matter. All the elementary particles can, at sufficiently high energies, be transmuted into other particles, or they can simply be created from kinetic energy and can be annihilated into energy, for instance into radiation.” (Physics and Philosophy, p. 139.) In fact, the universe in its earliest stages began simply as energy and only gradually transformed some of that energy into matter, so even matter itself can be considered a form of condensed energy rather than a separate and unique entity. So you could think of humans as beings of energy, not just collections of objects — in which case consciousness and free will no longer seem so strange.

Overall, I think Barr’s book is largely convincing in his critique of scientific materialism. He does not provide scientific evidence for the existence of God, but he does make belief in God reasonable, as long as it is not a fundamentalist God. Indeed, any respectable book on science and religion is going to have to reject the notion that the Bible is literally true in all aspects if it is going to be properly scientific. I think Barr does occasionally engage in cherry-picking of evidence from religious thinkers and traditions that make it look as if early Jewish and Christian thinkers were more farsighted in their understanding of the universe than they actually were. But ultimately, judging a religion by its understanding of natural causation is a risky task; when new discoveries are made that overturn the old claims, what does one do? It would be absurd to deny the new discoveries in order to save the religion.

Religious knowledge should be considered primarily a form of transcendent knowledge about the Good, not empirical knowledge about what and how the world is. The Catholic priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître was correct in rejecting attempts by others to use his Big Bang theory as evidence for the merits of Christianity. The best test of a religion is not whether it explains nature, but whether it actually makes human beings and human civilization better.

What Does Science Explain? Part 4 – The Ends of the Universe

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Continuing my series of posts on “What Does Science Explain?” (parts 1, 2 , and 3 here), I wish today to discuss the role of teleological causation. Aristotle referred to teleology in his discussion of four causes as “final causation,” because it referred to the goals or ends of all things (the Greek word “telos” meaning “goal,” “purpose,” or “end.”) From a teleological viewpoint, an acorn grows into an oak tree, a bird takes flight, and a sculptor creates statues because these are the inherent and intended ends of the acorn, bird, and sculptor. Medieval metaphysics granted a large role for teleological causation in its view of the universe.

According to E.A. Burtt in The Metaphysics of Modern Science, the growth of modern science changed the idea of causation, focusing almost exclusively on efficient causation (objects impacting or affecting other objects). The idea of final (goal-oriented) causation was dismissed. And even though the early modern scientists such as Galileo and Newton believed in God, their notion of God was significantly different from the traditional medieval conception of God. Rather than seeing God as the Supreme Good, which continually draws all things to higher levels of being, early modern scientists reduced God to the First Efficient Cause, who merely started the mechanism of the universe and then let it run.

It was not unreasonable for early scientists to focus on efficient causation rather than final causation. It was often difficult to come up with testable hypotheses and workable predictive models by assuming long-term goals in nature. There was always a strong element of mystery about what the true ends of nature were and it was very difficult to pin down these alleged goals. Descartes believed in God, but also wrote that it was impossible to know what God’s goals were. For that reason, it is quite likely that science in its early stages needed to overcome medieval metaphysics in order to make its first great discoveries about nature. Focusing on efficient causation was simpler and apt to bring quicker results.

However, now that science has advanced over the centuries, it is worth revisiting the notion of teleological causation as a means of filling in gaps in our current understanding of nature. It is true that the concept of long-term goals for physical objects and forces often does not help very much in terms of developing useful, short-term predictive models. But final causation can help make sense of long-term patterns which may not be apparent when making observations over short periods of time. Processes that look purposeless and random in the short-term may actually be purposive in the long-term. We know that an acorn under the right conditions will eventually become an oak tree, because the process and the outcome of development can be observed within a reasonable period of time and that knowledge has been passed on to us. If our knowledge base began at zero and we came across an acorn for the first time, we would find it extremely difficult to predict the long-term future of that acorn merely by cutting it up and examining it under a microscope.

So, does the universe have long-term, goal-oriented patterns that may be hidden among the short-term realities of contingency and randomness? A number of physicists began to speculate that this was the case in the late twentieth century, when their research indicated that the physical forces and constants of the universe can exist in only a very narrow range of possibilities in order for life to be possible, or even for the universe to exist. Change in even one of the forces or constants could make life impossible or cause the universe to self-destruct in a short period of time. In this view, the evolution of the universe and of life on earth has been subject to a great deal of randomness, but the cosmic structure and conditions that made evolution possible are not at all random. As the physicist Freeman Dyson has noted:

It is true that we emerged in the universe by chance, but the idea of chance is itself only a cover for our ignorance. . . . The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. (Disturbing the Universe, p. 250)

In what way did the universe “know we were coming?” Consider the fact that in the early universe after the Big Bang, the only elements that existed were the “light” elements hydrogen and helium, along with trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. A universe with only four elements would certainly be simple, but there would not be much to build upon. Life, at least as we know it, requires not just hydrogen but at a minimum carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. How did these and other heavier elements come into being? Stars produced them, through the process of fusion. In fact, stars have been referred to as the “factories” of heavy elements. Human beings today consist primarily of oxygen, followed by carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous. Additional elements compose less than one percent of the human body, but even most of these elements are essential to human life. Without the elements produced earlier by stars we would not be here. It has been aptly said that human beings are made of “stardust.”

So why did stars create the heavier elements? After all, the universe could have gotten along quite well without additional elements. Was it random chance that created the heavy elements? Not really. Random chance plays a role in many natural events, but the creation of heavy elements in stars requires some precise conditions — it is not just a churning jumble of subatomic particles. The astronomer Fred Hoyle was the first scientist to study how stars made heavy elements, and he noted that the creation of heavy elements required very specific values in order for the process to work. When he concluded his research Hoyle remarked, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

The creation of heavier elements by the stars does not necessarily mean that the universe intended specifically to create human beings, but it does seem to indicate that the universe somehow “knew” that heavy elements would be required to create higher forms of being, above and beyond the simple and primitive elements created by the Big Bang. In that sense, creating life is plausibly a long-term goal of the universe.

And what about life itself? Does it make sense to use teleology to study the behavior of life forms? Biologist Peter Corning has argued that while science has long pursued reductionist explanations of phenomena, it is impossible to really know biological systems without pursuing holistic explanations centered on the purposive behavior of organisms.

According to reductionism, all things can be explained by the parts that they are made of — human beings are made of tissues and organs, which are made of cells, which are made of chemical compounds, which are made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles. In the view of many scientists, everything about human beings can in principle be explained by actions at the subatomic level. Peter Corning, however, argues that this conception is mistaken. Reductionism is necessary for partially explaining biological systems, but it is not sufficient. The reason for this is that the wholes are greater than the parts, and the behavior of wholes often has characteristics that are radically different from the parts that they are made of. For example, it would be dangerous to add pure hydrogen or oxygen to a fire, but when hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms are combined in the right way — as H2O — one obtains a chemical compound that is quite useful for extinguishing fires. The characteristics of the molecule are different from the characteristics of the atoms in it. Likewise, at the subatomic level, particles may have no definite position in space and can even be said to exist in multiple places at once; but human beings only exist in one place at a time, despite the fact that human beings are made of subatomic particles. The behavior of the whole is different from the behavior of the parts. The transformation of properties that occurs when parts form new wholes is known as “emergence.”

Corning notes that when one incorporates analysis of wholes into theoretical explanation, there is goal-oriented “downward causation” as well as “upward causation.” For example, a bird seeks the goal of food and a favorable environment, so when it begins to get cold, that bird flies thousands of miles to a warmer location for the winter. The atoms that make up that bird obviously go along for the ride, but a scientist can’t use the properties of the atoms to predict the flight of these atoms; only by looking at the properties of the bird as a whole can a scientist predict what the atoms making up the bird are going to do. The bird as a whole doesn’t have complete control over the atoms composing its body, but it clearly has some control. Causation goes down as well as up. Likewise, neuropsychologist Roger Sperry has argued that human consciousness is a whole that influences the parts of the brain and body just as the parts of the brain and body influence the consciousness: “[W]e contend that conscious or mental phenomena are dynamic, emergent, pattern (or configurational) properties of the living brain in action . . . these emergent pattern properties in the brain have causal control potency. . . ” (“Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept 1966) In Sperry’s view, the values created by the human mind influence human behavior as much as the atoms and chemicals in the human body and brain.

Science has traditionally viewed the evolution of the universe as upward causation only, with smaller parts joining into larger wholes as a result of the laws of nature and random chance. This view of causation is illustrated in the following diagram:

reductionism

But if we take seriously the notion of emergence and purposive action, we have a more complex picture, in which the laws of nature and random chance constrain purposive action and life forms, but do not entirely determine the actions of life forms — i.e., there is both upward and downward causation:

reductionism_and_holism

It is important to note that this new view of causation does not eliminate the laws of nature — it just sets limits on what the laws of nature can explain. Specifically, the laws of nature have their greatest predictive power when we are dealing with the simplest physical phenomena; the complex wholes that are formed by the evolutionary process are less predictable because they can to some extent work around the laws of nature by employing the new properties that emerge from the joining of parts. For example, it is relatively easy to predict the motion of objects in the solar system by using the laws of nature; it is not so easy to predict the motion of life forms because life forms have properties that go beyond the simple properties possessed by objects in the solar system. As Robert Pirsig notes in Lila, life can practically be defined by its ability to transcend or work around the static patterns of the laws of nature:

The law of gravity . . . is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the single protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon. (Lila (1991), p. 143.

Many scientists still resist the notion of teleological causation. But it could be argued that even scientists who vigorously deny that there is any purpose in the universe actually have an implicit teleology. Their teleology is simply the “laws of nature” themselves, and either the inner goal of all things is to follow those laws, or it is the goal of the laws to compel all things to follow their commands. Other implicit teleologies can be found in scientists’ assumptions that nature is inherently simple; that mathematics is the language of nature; or that all the particles and forces in the nature play some necessary role. According to physicist Paul Davies,

There is . . . an unstated but more or less universal feeling among physicists that everything that exists in nature must have a ‘place’ or a role as part of some wider scheme, that nature should not indulge in profligacy by manifesting gratuitous entities, that nature should not be arbitrary. Each facet of physical reality should link in with the others in a ‘natural’ and logical way. Thus, when the particle known as the muon was discovered in 1937, the physicist Isidor Rabi was astonished. ‘Who ordered that?’ he exclaimed. (Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, pp. 209-10.

Ultimately, however, one cannot fully discuss the goals or ends of the universe without exploring the notion of Ideal Forms — that is, a blueprint for all things to follow or aspire to. The subject of Ideal Forms will be discussed in my next post.