The Godlessness of the Gaps
Philosophy Professor John Haldane adds his own commentary to the list addressing Stephen Hawking’s lately released The Grand Design. If the subject catches your interest, you should certainly read the whole essay, but one point attracted my attention in particular:
[The authors] then go on to note, however, that “it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life but also the characteristics of our entire Universe, and that is much more difficult to explain.” The forces of nature had to allow the production of carbon and other heavy elements, and allow them to exist stably; they had to facilitate the formation of stars and galaxies but also the periodic explosion of stars to distribute the elements needed for life more widely, permitting the formation of planets suitably composed for the evolution of life; and the strengths of the forces themselves and the masses of the fundamental particles on which they operate had to be of the correct orders of magnitude, and these lie within very small ranges. …
In short, and sparing the detail, ours is but one of an indefinite number of universes with different laws and forces, each universe being a spontaneous creation out of nothing: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe [that is, ours] can and will create itself from nothing.”
What’s striking is that the philosophy that emerges from Hawking’s work is almost a precise mirror image of the accusation of last resort for secularists belittling believers. They say that we are always seeking a “God of the gaps” — a divine force that explains the shrinking list of natural phenomena that mankind has yet to decipher. While protesting that such theology is hardly the most sophisticated available for debate (let alone universal), I’ll concede that some folks do take that short cut.
But even so, what Hawking produces is an assumption of ever larger schemes of chaos and chance to explain all of that which appears ordered. That, ultimately, is no less a matter of faith, and it shares with the “gaps” religiosity the attribute of wholly missing the point: That we understand the method of the artist’s craft does not disprove the artist, and we shouldn’t allow it to suck the wonder right out of the work.
I think that hypothesizing a possible answer while holding it with logical skepticism is different from claiming that one has found the correct answer based on nothing more than faith.
I’ll stick the the skeptical, faithless, but intellectually honest “we don’t know yet but we keep working on it” answer to the origin of the universe.
I think that scientists indulge in the same sort of philosophy that they object to. Let us take the “primordial ooze” that life sprang from. No one can duplicate that “ooze” in order to prove it, they cannot state with specificity what it contained. They simply hypothesize the explanation. Hence, the “primordial ooze” is not a provable “fact”. Then, without apology, they take their evidence of evolution and simply posit the “primordial ooze” as a “fact”. So, how does proposing the ooze as a “fact” differ from observing creation and accepting God as a “fact”? Some will say observable science will someday alter this, but not yet.
I have always liked the analogy that accepting the present theories of evolution is rather like believing that a tornado could hit a junkyard and produce a 747. The counter argument is that if God created all things, why did he do it in such a disorderly fashion?
“ours is but one of an indefinite number of universes with different laws and forces”
Proof, please?
Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love” was a fun and absorbing novel, not the least because the plot was predicated upon the existence of an infinite “number of universese with different laws and forces”.
But a novelist does not have the burden of proof that is conferred upon a scientist.
Right, Monique. Neither does a Pope, an Archbishop, or an Ayatollah.
Warrington… The ‘primordial ooze’ just means a bunch of dissolved salts in water that can form the building blocks of DNA (shown to be totally viable in the Miller-Urey experiment).
The cool thing about DNA is that you can take the raw ingredients (the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs), subject it to warming and cooling cycles, and any combined pairs will replicate themselves over and over. That’s how they get enough DNA evidence to test with from a tiny sample. PCR. I do some work for a place that builds hybridization ovens that do this.
It’s a bit more tricky to figure out how that simple process ends up becoming pre-cellular ‘life-like’ stuff, but friends of mine who work with DNA and cellular life say the things are pretty remarkable, just through inherent and understood chemical properties.
Your tornado-into-a-747 theory is missing a few things:
A single test tube full of these ingredients is the equivalent of trillions of tornadoes hitting trillions of warehouses every minute… There are millions of years and trillions of gallons from which life could have arisen.
Also, there’s no reason to start with a 747, just like life probably didn’t start with anything that resembled a cell. It’s more like ‘A tornado hitting a 747 and creating something that resembled a tricycle, inasmuch as you could ride it’. It’s not likely, but given a few trillion-billion tornadoes, you’re likely to find something that works well enough.
Mangeek,
My analogy may be poor, but I am neither a biologist or mathematician. Evolutionary theory seems to follow the old saw that “if you put enough monkeys in a room with typewriters, eventually one will write Shakespeare”.
I have seen mathematical discourses on the monkeys which tend to show that if the monkeys had been at it since the beginning of time, the period would be insufficient.
Sufficiency of time seems to be the chief stumbling block of evolution. How many trillions and trillions of collisions would be necessary before a strand of DNA became an optic nerve, not to say an eyeball? Then think of the number of different eyeballs. If only mammals had eyes, it would be easier to follow. But flies have them, very different from our own.
Still, science progresses at an amazing rate. Perhaps the answer is around the corner. I am simply ruminanting.
“How many trillions and trillions of collisions would be necessary before a strand of DNA became an optic nerve, not to say an eyeball?”
It’s likely that ‘eyes’ evolved from simple light-detecting mechanisms (a VERY simple thing to build, photosensors that apply varying electrical resistance based on varying light input are super-easy to make). Plants exhibit phototropism, leaning and turning towards light just using chemical reactions. Apply billions of years of mutation, speciation, and natural selection, and you end up with all the different kinds of ‘eyes’.
And I’ll bet all the ‘eyes’ out there in the world, from deep-sea animals that can only detect the presence of light, to fruit flies, to the marvel of a hawk’s optics share most of their underlying genetic code.
I for one don’t see anything that indicates an all-powerful creator with an agenda involving day-to-day activities on our particular ball of rock. I’d be amazed if we didn’t find all sorts of places off-planet teeming with different forms of life.
“ours is but one of an indefinite number of universes with different laws and forces” Proof, please? I continue to be amazed at how little some seem to understand the nature of scientific inquiry (and yet continue to opine as if an expert on all things scientific). Gravity is a theory, but I don’t suggest jumping off tall buildings because scientists can’t prove it. Here’s Hawking from “A Brief History of Time:” In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions such as whether it has a beginning or an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simpleminded view that a theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean). A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. For example, Aristotle believed Empedocles’s theory that everything was made out of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. This was simple enough, but did not make any definite predictions. On the other hand, Newton’s theory of gravity was based on an even simpler model, in which bodies attracted each other with a force that was proportional to a quantity called their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Yet it predicts the motions of the sun, the moon, and the planets to a high degree of accuracy.… Read more »
I get the feeling Justin hasn’t read any Hawking, because that’s not the case at all. Again, from “A Brief History of Time” (haven’t read his new book, although maybe I should):
This may speak even better to why Justin is wrong about Hawking assuming “ever larger schemes of chaos.” Quite the contrary: