I would like to briefly summarize and then comment on a New York Times interview of philosopher Tim Maudlin (M) by the philosopher Gary Gutting (G)entitled “Modern Cosmology Versus God’s Creation.” Here is an abridged version of that conversation, followed by my comments at the end.
G – “Could you begin by noting aspects of recent scientific cosmology that are particularly relevant to theological questions?”
M – It depends on the theological account. Modern cosmology refutes the Biblical account of an earth at the center of creation–the universe is vast and we are not at its center.
G – Just because the universe is big and we aren’t at the center doesn’t mean we can’t have a spiritual relationship with our god. Besides, there may be other purposes for the universe or other creatures with relationships with our god.
M – Humans may or may not have an important role in the universe, or perhaps the universe doesn’t care about any beings. But accounts that make us the main purpose of the creation seem contrary to the evidence.
G – Biblical literalism is inconsistent with cosmology, but other versions of theism–like the belief that an intelligent being created the cosmos–are not refuted by modern cosmology.
M – Traditional theism doesn’t just say some being created the universe, but that it was created with us in mind. The evidence of the huge structure of the cosmos, with most of it irrelevant to life, our location in that universe, and the eons of time necessary for evolution, belie the claim that it was created for us.
G- Perhaps, but we don’t know what a creator wants. Maybe the creator made a huge universe for us to study. Also, what do you think about fine-tuning–the idea that the constants, parameters, and laws of nature are seemingly perfect for life?
M – We don’t know what these constants are, or if they are even constant, so we can’t say much about them from a scientific point of view. But if a deity wants us to know of its existence, there would be easier ways to do so.
G – That assumes we know how deities behave. But I’ll admit that we might explain the constants scientifically.
M- Yes. For example, if there are an infinite number of universes, then life would probably evolve somewhere.
G – So we don’t know if fine-tuning for human life supports theism?
M – ” … note how ‘humans’ got put into that question! If there were any argument like this to be made, it would go through equally well for cockroaches. They, too, can only exist in certain physical conditions.” Imagine a deity who created the universe with us as an unintended byproduct of nature’s constants. This is as plausible a hypothesis for the constants of nature as the Biblical hypothesis that the cosmos was made for us.
G – What about the idea that we need a creator to explain the existence of the universe? And what about the view of some cosmologists, like Lawrence Krauss, that a quantum fluctuation could have produced something from nothing?
M – People want more than a creator as an explanation; they want to be significant in the creation. Also, a nonmaterial cause must either be explained by something else–in which case it’s not the ultimate cause, or it explains itself, in which case we might as well say the cosmos is its own cause as a god is. And if the universe is infinite, then it didn’t have a cause at all. As for Krauss, he thinks the quantum vacuum state marks the end of causation, but I don’t think we can answer these questions definitively.
G – So, scientific cosmology doesn’t support theism, and it refutes the claim that we are the primary purpose of god’s creation. Still, would you grant the minimal claim “that the universe was created by an intelligent being” as at least reasonable, or does science support atheism or agnosticism?
M – “Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role.” The main problem with a minimalist account is “that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theories. The default position can be overcome.”
Commentary – The more specifically we define the gods, the less likely they are to be real on mere probabilistic grounds. The more vague we are about them, the less we say when we talk about them. If good scientific evidence for the gods emerges, then we should give them our provisional assent. Until such time, we should not believe in them. Let me conclude by quoting from a previous post.
Still, people will find their gods hiding in the gaps of quantum or cosmological theories, or in dark matter or energy. If you are determined to believe something, it is hard to change your mind. But defenders of the gods fight a rearguard action–scientific knowledge is relentless–and these hidden gods are nothing like the traditional ones. Those gods are dead.
And as science closes the gaps in our knowledge, the gods will recede further and further into the recesses of infinite space and time until they vanish altogether, slowly blown away, not by cosmic winds, but by ever-encroaching thought.
First, the attempt to reconcile religion with science has always been a losing proposition. Science just keeps explaining more and more of our universe, leaving less and less room for religion. The lesson here is that we must keep the spiritual separate from and independent of the secular. Christ saw this clearly, expressing the concept several times. “Render unto Caesar…” and “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Religion was initially created to help explain the operation of the world. That was understandable when the world was a mysterious place. But by the time of Newton, it should have been obvious that religion was no longer necessary to explain anything about the universe. “”Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light”
It won’t work for religion to retreat to make a last stand on the mechanism for the creation of the universe. Last February I published what I proudly believed to be a profoundly crackpot idea for the creation of the universe: (https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/science/speculations-on-cosmology.html) Then, to my great chagrin, I discovered that some physicists had already come up with the same idea.
We don’t need religion to explain the universe. Our spiritual beliefs should be untethered to such base concerns and be free to soar into the ineffable realms of the purpose and meaning of life.
Oops, I left out an important point: the notion that our universe is fine-tuned for life is all wrong. Instead, our biological systems are fine-tuned for this universe. The fact that our stomachs can digest some of the plants and animals that inhabit this earth is not something to wonder about; any creature that had a digestive system unsuited to the plants and animals on this earth would have died of starvation long, long ago. Our eyes don’t “just happen” to see the same set of wavelengths that the sun floods the earth with; the match between their sensitivity and the sun’s output is a necessary consequence of the simplest notions of evolution.
If our universe had somewhat different values for the fundamental constants, then we would still have life, just radically different from life on this planet. The fundamental driver of life is not carbon, or water, or any particular temperature range — the fundamental driver of life is negentropy. Our universe has gobs and gobs of negentropy. Therefore, it will develop life.
And finally, here is an essay on my website explaining in greater detail the absurdity of the notion of biofavorability: https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/science/a-universe-designed-for.html
Thanks for the thoughtful comments Chris. Also, while reading your “A Universe Designed for Life???” essay just now I ran across this paragraph
“There’s something almost Panglossian in Hawkings’ thinking. Of course we’re in a universe where the fundamental constants are just right — if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to notice it! If the asteroid hadn’t hit Yucatan 65 million years ago, we probably wouldn’t be here, either. That doesn’t make the asteroid some act of divine providence; it was just one of the many twists and turns in the rise of life on earth.”
I used the dinosaur example myself in a somewhat different context in a paper some years ago where I wrote.
“As the physicist Paul Davies put it: “the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings, the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.”5 Similar ideas reverberate in the work of the palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris. He argues that if intelligence had not developed in humans, it would have done so in another species — in other words, the emergence of intelligence on our planet was inevitable.6
I strongly disagree. Mind and its attendant phenomena may be important, but it doesn’t follow that we are meant to be here or that intelligence was inevitable. It’s only because we value our life and intelligence that we succumb to such anthropocentrism. Homo sapiens might easily have never been, as countless events could have led to their downfall. This should give us pause when we imbue our existence with undue significance.
So we were not inevitable, we were not meant to be here—we are serendipitous. The trillions and trillions of evolutionary machinations that led to us might easily have led to different results—ones that didn’t include us. As for the inevitability of intelligence, are we really to suppose that dinosaurs, had they not been felled by an asteroid, were on their way to human-like intelligence? Such a view strains credulity; dinosaurs had been around for many millions of years without developing greater intelligence. We want to believe evolution had us as its goal—but it did not. We should forgo our penchant for detecting patterns and accept our radical contingency. Remember, like the dinosaurs, we too could be felled by an asteroid.
JGM
I thank Mr. Crawford for the concise idea that “this universe is fine tuned for life” has it backwards. It is actually “life is fine tuned for this universe”.
This has always been obvious (to me) but I now have a succinct manner of stating ‘the obvious’.
As Prof. Messerly states, everything that is, including intelligent Man, just is. Change just one item or another (such as an asteroids velocity) and mammals could still be just small ground rodents.
The wonderment at ‘everything being as such’ reminds me why time travel of any lengthy period into the past just isn’t possible. Any traveler would change past events, which eventually would eliminate the reality he/she started from.
Intelligent life, self-aware and able to think in abstract terms with symbology, may be much rarer in the universe than is commonly supposed.
The number of chance obstacles to its emergence are almost infinite.
Maybe we really are special?
thanks for the thoughtful comments, Lyle, JGM