modern physics and ancient faith

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

A summary of the book by Stephen Barr

Mike Davenport

Outline

Prolog: What is Scientific Materialism

Five Arguments against Scientific Materialism:

1) The Beginning of Time

2) Symmetry and Beauty (all the way down)

3) Exquisite Details (anthropic coincidences)

4) Human Insight (Godel’s Theorem)

5) Free Will (argued from quantum mechanics)

Epilog: a surfeit of infinities.

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http://www.stjohnsrichmond.ca/

Purpose of the Book

Presuppositional Apologetics:

• “this book is not about proofs”

• “Science, it was claimed, had fulfilled the materialist’s expectations and confounded the religious believer’s.

• “In this book, I am making the same claim, but in reverse:• I am claiming that on the critical points, recent discoveries

have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and confirm those of the believer in God.

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Not About Proofs4


Outline









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Scientific Materialism

“The basic tenet of so-called “scientific materialism” is that nothing exists except matter, and that everything in the world must therefore be the result of the strict mathematical laws of physics and blind chance.”

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Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology

• Read pp 4-5

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Dawkins

Hitchens


http://gedanken451.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/dawkins.jpg

Materialist Myth 1

“Biblical religions originated in pre-scientific attempts to explain natural phenomena”

False:• Bible shows almost no interest in explaining natural phenomena• The Bible helped clear the ground for science by

“depersonalizing” the natural world:• Trees, sun, oceans are no longer supernatural• Supernatural is focused in a personal God• Not interested in supernatural explanations of nature

• Hence: science sprang from Christians and Jews (mostly)

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Materialist Myth 2

“Church vs Galileo was typical of Christian attitude to science”

False:• Condemnation of Galileo was “manifestly an anomaly”• Galileo is the only example of the Catholic Church condemning a

scientific theory.• “the attitude of the church has overwhelmingly been one of

friendliness to scientific enquiry”• Many important scientific figures were monks, priests and

bishops

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Materialist Myth 3

“Faith is opposed to rational enquiry and puts an end to thought”

False:• The ideal of Christian theology is “faith seeking understanding”

and “I believe so that I may understand” (St. Augustine)• Belief in God suggests that reality is completely rational and

intelligible• We are finite and God is infinite, so we believe that even things

that are unintelligible to us, are intelligible to God.

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Materialist Irony #1

While faith does not limit what we are able to think about, materialism does:• Materialists do not allow themselves to contemplate things that

are not completely describable by physics.• Ironically, materialist views are thus more narrow minded and

more dogmatic than religious views.

• The arguments for materialism are all, ultimately, circular: “materialism is true because it must be true.”

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110 Years Ago

• Time was a single dimension stretching infinitely far into the past and the future

• To think of a “beginning of time” made no more sense than to think of an “edge of the universe”

• There was no hint of the “beginning” that people of faith believed in.

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Einstein / Spacetime / Big Bang

1916:• Einstein’s General Relativity suggested that the universe could

be expanding or contracting

1920s:• Hubble and others observed that the universe is expanding• LeMaitre (a Roman Catholic priest) suggested all could have

started with a Big Bang

1964:• Light from the Big Bang

is observed

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Current Big-Bang Cosmology15


Big Bang a (Slight) Problem for Materialists

• When the universe was thought to exist forever, it was hard to imagine a creator

• Now there is much contemplation of cosmologies with pulsating universes, “bubble” universes, colliding universes, etc.

• All intended to problem a “non-creation” explanation for the universe

• Actually not a problem but rather fun for scientists – hard to be proved wrong

Problem remains (e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre): why is there something, rather than nothing?

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Moral of the Big Bang History

Don’t water down or deny what the Bible teaches just because materialists insist something else must be true.

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Blue: Energy emanating from the nebula around the dying star PSR B1509-58. Red: A neighboring gas cloud called RCW 89.


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Argument from Design

Thomas Acquinas (1270)

Isaac Newton (1687)

William Paley (1802):• Saw evidence for God in the natural world.• “In crossing a heath, suppose I found an iPhone upon the

ground, and it should be inquired how the iPhone happened to be in that place. The iPhone functionality being observed, the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the iPhone must have had a maker who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”

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Argument from Design

Thomas Acquinas (1270)

Isaac Newton (1687)

William Paley (1802):• Saw evidence for God in the natural world.• “In crossing a heath, suppose I found a watch upon the

ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. The watch’s functionality being observed, the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”

• Thus: there must have been a watchmaker.

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Blind Watchmaker

Dawkin’s critique of Paley:• Evolution is the “Blind Watchmaker”• Complexities of nature explained by random chance.

Barr’s critique of Dawkin:• “Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have

come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point.”

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More Generally…

In science, order comes from order:• Barr: “In every case where science explains order, it does so, in

the final analysis, by appealing to a greater, more impressive, and more comprehensive underlying orderliness.”

• “We now have the problem of explaining not merely a butterfly’s wing, but a universe that can produce butterfly wings.”

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Materialists postulate (as they must) that this pervasive order must have come about by chance:• David Hume: “Many worlds might have been botched and

bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out.”

Barr:• “How ironic that, having renounced belief in God because God is

not material or observable by sense or instrument, the atheist may be driven to postulate not one but an infinite of unobservables in the material world itself!”

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Man’s Place in the Universe

David:

• “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?”

Materialist View:• Stephen Jay Gould: The human race is a freak accident of

evolutionary history, “a tiny twig on an ancient tree of life”• Stephen Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible,

the more it also seems pointless.”

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Anthropic Coincidences

Definition:• “Many features of the laws of physics seem to coincide exactly

with what is required for the emergence of life to be possible.”

Barr looks at:• Strength of the Strong Nuclear Force• Three-Alpha process• Stability of the Proton• Strength of the Electromagnetic Force• Vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field• Cosmological constant• Flatness of space• Number of dimensions in space

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Why is the size it is?

• is the sum of a bunch of positive and negative values• Those values are typically 100,000,000,000,000,000 time as big

as • There is no obvious reason why they should cancel each other

out• If n was even 1.4 times as large as it is, the heavier elements

(that we are made of) would not have formed.

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Objections to the Anthropic Coincidences

1) Maybe they aren’t really needed for life to evolve• Many of them are so fundamental that it is extremely hard to

imagine life without them

2) Maybe they derive from some deeper laws• Then the deeper laws become anthropic coincidences

3) Maybe “God had no choice”• “If any theoretical physicist were paid a dollar for every possible

universe he could think up, he would get rick very quickly”• “God had a choice – an infinite number of choices”

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Can Matter Understand?

Materialists insist that the brain is a computer.

Question:• What two even integers (positive or negative) add together to 17 ?

Because the boundaries of the question are infinite, a computer will search forever for an answer.• The computer does not understand• We understand

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Gödel / Lucas / Penrose Argument

Gödel's incompleteness theorem:• Even in an ideal artificial intelligence

(AI) there will be true statements understandable by that AI, whose truth cannot be evaluated by the AI.

Lucas / Penrose:• Because Gödel was able to prove that those statements (the

ones that the AI can’t prove to be true) are true, then Godel is not an AI.

• Thus Gödel's brain (at least) was not a computer.

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(the full proof is harder than this)


Is Man a Machine?

“Thus the idea that man can be nothing other than a machine is really nothing other than a pure deduction from atheism. There is not a shred of positive evidence that a material system can reproduce the human abilities to understand abstractly and will freely.”

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110 Years Ago

• Every indication coming from scientific research was that we lived in a physically deterministic world

• Thus if people are physical creatures, then people had no free will – all is predetermined.

• “One of the few areas where scientific theories had the potential to be in clear conflict with religious doctrine.”

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Determinism and Free Will

Quantum Mechanics (1920s):• Strict determinism is overthrown• Completely unexpected by scientists

Barr:• Quantum theory will not succeed in explaining free will• But religious people would not expect it to: free will stems from

our spiritual nature

However:• Quantum indeterminacy “provides an opening for free will”

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Materialism and Free Will

Barr: “If free will exists, then scientific materialism is wrong”

Thus, not surprisingly:• Materialists deny that we have free will

• Some say it is altogether an illusion• Same say it just means that the choice was made without

coercion from outside the person’s body

[Paul says that without the Holy Spirit we have no free will – we are slaves to sin.]

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“Those who think being “scientific” means being ready at the drop of a hat to debunk anything that seems obvious, or being willing to disregard all that is intuitively known, are walking a foolish and treacherous path.”• Leads to pure skepticism about everything, including science

• “There was a time when religious skeptics proudly called themselves “free thinkers.” It is ironic that the modern materialist skeptic disbelieves even in the reality of his own freedom, both moral and intellectual.”

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Unique Role of the Observer

Conventional quantum mechanics says:• As long as a system is unobserved, all possible outcomes co-

exist as “mixed states”• Once an observation is made, the mixed state collapses into a

single reality.

A very uncomfortable concept for materialists, because the “observer” seems to be something fundamentally different from the “observed.”

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Many-Worlds Interpretation

One way to make the observers “just material”:• Assume that the mixed states never collapse• Instead all possible outcome happen (one world sprouts many

worlds)• We (conscious people) experience a single reality because we

are zooming through one specific set of those many worlds.

YIKES:• “The price to be paid for eliminating the observer and the

observer’s mind from the picture in this way, however, is the postulating of an infinite number of branches of reality, with an infinite number of versions of every person, that are completely unobservable to us.”

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Is a Pattern Emerging?

“The materialist seems to be forced to assert of himself not only that he is a machine, which for most people is absurd enough, but that he is really an infinite number of inconsistent machines dividing and subdividing into more and more realities in a universe that is only one of an infinite number of universes, many of which are also dividing and subdividing.”

vs the Christian view:• “For by him (Christ) all things were created: things on heaven

and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together.”

1 Col 1:16

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modern physics and ancient faith

Documents

prescientific attempts

beginning of timesymmetry

materialist views

materialist irony

religious views

natural world

materialists expectations

quantum mechanicsepilog