Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (22 page)

Does that mean we should give up our quest for “signs of creation” in the world that surrounds us? Of course not. The only problem is that the whole universe is the work of God and if by “sign” we mean something like a footprint on a sparkling stretch of snow, in other words a local effect indicating that there has been an intervention, then in point of fact we are looking for a gap to be filled with the God hypothesis. Putting it in another way, the entire universe is one great sign of God, so no wonder we’re looking in vain if our attention is concentrating on details which are to point to the existence of a Creator. So let’s focus on the Entirety. One may certainly contemplate in silent awe the immensity of the galaxies, the profundity of space, the aeons of time, the abysses of the black holes and the gigantic energy of the Big Bang. That’s what some of the poets and writers of science books for non-specialists do. Maybe it’s worthwhile taking an occasional look at the artistry of the Grand Cosmos. But such experiences can only be an “effect of the scale”: on the scale of the discoveries made by science we are but a negligible speck of dust. That’s why it’s quite easy to feel a respect for the Immensity. But it’s enough to remind oneself that the Immensity may itself be just a speck – not much more than nothing – in the infinity of other universes, for the respect to turn into bewilderment and a feeling of hopelessness.

What we should be doing when we focus on the Entirety is not to allow ourselves to be carried away by our emotions, but rather to search for something that characterises the Entirety at its most profound level. We have been looking at something like that from several vantage-points virtually from the first page of this book. What I have in mind is the
rational aspect of the Entirety
, the property thanks to which we are able to examine it rationally. All the scientific theories, all the controversies concerning their interpretation, all the philosophers’ deliberations have thrived thanks to this aspect of the Entirety. If there were no rational element in it any answer to any arbitrary question put to the world at large would be equally good, while a universe rent apart by contradictions could never have come into existence at all.

The Entirety is the Great Sign of God – the Mind of God, the Creative Concept inscribed in the existing universe. All the scientific theories, all the efforts to arrive at the right interpretation of them, all the endeavours philosophers have made constitute the collective attempt of humankind to decipher the Concept inherent in the structure of that which exists.

Slowly the components of that Concept are beginning to fit into an Entirety. There are still many cracks and crevices in it, but they are the outcome of our lack of proficiency, not of the Concept. We have the right to think that by keeping to the scientific method and refraining from premature conclusions we shall gradually fill in the crevices and seal up the cracks. Often what we discover seems so exciting that we lose the strength and will to take it one step further.

That Grand Concept has one more property. We do not know in what language it has been written, but from our point of view as its rather clumsy interpreters it appears to have been written in the language of mathematics. We ourselves have created this language, chiefly to crack the code of Nature (and thereafter as it were as an art for art’s sake), and it has turned out to be so successful that we have the right to believe that in a way it reflects the Language of the Concept itself.

Perhaps it’s as Leibniz suspected: when God engages in His Mathematics, there arise universes.

Words are not innocent, like for example chairs or pebbles on the beach. Words can injure or kill. Words can be misappropriated and instead of saying what they mean can start misleading, leading astray. Something of this sort has happened recently to two verbal expressions: “creationism” (“creation science”) and “intelligent design.” The term “creationism” was well-grounded in the philosophical and theological tradition and was in standard use in the sense of the Christian doctrine of the creation of the world by God. But the word has been misappropriated by fundamentalist groups in the USA who are convinced that the admission of the biological theory of evolution is in conflict with the Christian religion, claiming that the literal interpretation of Chap. 1 of the Book of Genesis should be accorded the name “creation science” and calling for “equal rights” for this “science” with the theories of modern biology. It took quite a long time for these ideas to reach Europe from the United States, nonetheless now, when someone (even in Europe) admits to a belief that the world was created he is almost automatically branded a Fundamentalist. I am not going to argue with “creation science.” Anyone who has read the previous chapters will see how profoundly unwarranted that standpoint is.

When the Fundamentalist Creationists started losing case after case in the American courts for “equal rights” for their ideas with “official science” they adopted a new strategy. They dropped the “creation science” label and the direct reference to the Biblical account and transferred to a more philosophical dimension. The theory of evolution explained the origins of life and its subsequent development by a series of random events. But, they said, in His creation of the world God implemented His “intelligent design,” and random occurrence conflicted with “intelligent design.” Rather than wrangle with the theory of evolution, they now said it should be reshuffled and augmented by emphasis on the vestiges of Intelligent Design in Nature. This doctrine was “more intelligent” than Fundamentalist Creationism, and many religious thinkers fell for it. An attentive reader who has gone through the previous chapters of this book would no doubt manage to answer this line of argument on his own, but it might be worthwhile to take a closer look at this issue. Yes, I shall embark on polemic, but not so much in order to refute the arguments of the “opposition,” rather to treat these claims as an opportunity to scrutinise some of the aspects of the theology of creation.

Yet again the term “intelligent design” has been misappropriated by a group of dissidents (with respect to authentic science). When He created the universe, God applied a transcendent counterpart – meaning a counterpart transcending all our concepts – of what we rightly call “intelligent design.” No theologian would quarrel with such a statement. But today, if we resorted to the expression “intelligent design” we would, more or less automatically, be banded together with the group of “scientific dissidents.” That is why in the previous chapter I did not use the expression “intelligent design” but “Creative Concept” (compare with Einstein’s idea of the “Mind of God”). Generalising, the semantic difference between these two terms is that whereas “intelligent design” assumes an opposition between God’s design and random occurrence, “creative concept” makes no such assumption. In this approach God is Lord also of random events, which He incorporates in His Creative Concept. I am of the opinion that an idea to the contrary is a serious theological mistake.

Let’s start with some remarks on the theory of evolution and its place in the general system of science. For all the sciences about the world constitute a system. Of course the different sciences are concerned with different areas or aspects of the world, but they are all connected not only by sharing the same elements of scientific method, but also by the fact that they are all committed to the study of the same world, thanks to which the results obtained in one discipline of science may – and often do – carry consequences for other scientific disciplines. This applies especially to biology and physics. Living organisms are undeniably also physical bodies. But the dependence goes deeper. Living organisms could not exist without organic chemistry; organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds; and as soon as we put the question of the origin of carbon (and we can hardly not put that question), we are in the realm of astrophysics, or even cosmology.

Today we have a fully developed theory of nucleogenesis (viz. the origins of the nuclei of the chemical elements) which agrees well with observations. These observations consist in the comparison of the level of agreement between the predictions of the theory of nucleogenesis with the abundance of the particular elements in the universe now. We know, for example, that the nuclei of the light elements were synthesised within the first few minutes after the Big Bang, when the temperature in the universe was high enough to facilitate the nuclear reactions which gave rise to the emergence of atomic nuclei. The nuclei of deuterium (the heavy hydrogen isotope), helium and lithium were made in this way. All the other chemical elements were made much later in the interiors of massive stars. This also applies to carbon, the crucial element for the emergence of life. But for carbon to be made, the original hydrogen had to be “burned through” in several generations of stars. Massive stars end their lifecycles in an explosion known as a supernova, and new generations of stars arise from their ashes. This cycle has to last for some 9–10 billion years. In a time as long as this the recession of the galaxies will have expanded the universe to a distance of some 9–10 billion light years. Thus, for carbon-based life to appear on at least one planet on an orbit around a star, the universe must be old and big. In this sense life is a phenomenon of cosmic significance, even if it exists on just one planet.

Biological evolution is undoubtedly a complex dynamic process, and as such is embedded in the dynamics of the universe; it is one of the strands of that dynamics closely bound to its other strands. Let’s take a closer look at the extraordinary fine tuning of the life of which we are carriers with the structure of the Entirety.

In other words, the “drunken walk” which was to take us to the “domain of life” was not so “drunken” after all. Most of the routes to the empty domains were simply blocked. Putting it less metaphorically: yes, chance played a role in the emergence of life, but some outcomes were more probable than others. God cast the dice (another metaphor!), but His dice were loaded. The idea of “loaded dice” (weighted probabilities) fits comfortably into the laws of physics; if the probabilities had been slightly different, the universe would have remained forever barren, inhospitable to life. To put it in another way: random events are part and parcel of the laws of physics, which are written in the language of mathematics, and probability theory, which governs chance and random events, is a mathematical structure. So no wonder that along with other mathematical structures it is part of the sophisticated composition that makes up the software of the universe.

Let’s take a closer look at the mathematical structure responsible for the “standard” concept of probability (there are other, “non-standard” concepts of probability as well in mathematics). If we give some more attentive thought to the matter, we shall admit that the attribution of a probability to a variety of occurrences is reminiscent of taking a measurement.
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For instance, when I measure the length of the table I find that its length is a certain number of units (e.g. 2.5 m). If I say that my lottery ticket has a 1/3,000,000 chance of winning, I’m also ascribing a number to a particular event. Here it doesn’t matter that it’s an event and not an object like a table. What’s more relevant is the fact that I’m ascribing a number between zero and one to events. If I didn’t buy a lottery ticket the probability of winning would be zero; if I bought up all the tickets, the probability of winning would be one (but then I would have to pay more for all the tickets than the jackpot was worth). In all other cases the probability would be a fraction between zero and one.

This example is instructive, as in mathematics probability theory is a special case of the theory of measure. We won’t go into the technical details; here all we have to do is remember that mathematics is a formal science which tells us nothing about the world. Hence the mathematical measure theory is not concerned with real measurement processes; it only formulates the principles for the attribution of numbers (“measures”) to certain subsets of a given space and deduces conclusions from those principles (axioms). If we impose a “normalising condition” on this measure theory, viz. a condition that the sum of all the measures (the sum of all the numbers ascribed to the subsets of the given space) must be equal to one (and all measures are positive), then we say that the measures are probability measures and that under this condition measure theory is probability theory.

Note that in probability measures understood in this way there is no sense of uncertainty, hesitation or anticipation of the kind we tend to associate with the concept of probability. There are only hard and fast rules, and their principles of operation – just as there are in every other branch of mathematics.

How does all this relate to “estimating the probabilities of various events occurring in the real world”? In just the same way as for other cases whenever we apply a mathematical theory to the observation of the world. We have to “apply” the given mathematical theory to the world, viz.
interpret
it as a structure of the world, or – in other words – acknowledge that the given mathematical theory is
a model of the world
(usually only in a certain respect). Of course we do not do this arbitrarily, but by applying standard research procedures devised by science, that is above all we try to take heed of the verdict of observations and experimental results. The results obtained hitherto, in combination with the history of the given problem, usually suggest which mathematical structure we should adopt, and later the comparison of the predictions obtained on the basis of the mathematical model we have constructed with subsequent observations and experimental results will tell us whether to accept or reject the model.

It’s the same with probability theory. The mathematical measure theory itself does not tell us anything about the world until we interpret it, that is “apply” it to the world. Let’s take a very simple example. Tossing a coin. Heads or tails? If the coin is true we say that the probability of heads (or tails) is ½. What does this mean? From the mathematical point of view what we have here is a space consisting of two subsets, one of which is labelled “heads” and the other “tails”. To each of them we ascribe the measure ½. This is a probability measure, because the sum of the measures for all the subsets is equal to one. Now we say that this basically very simple mathematical structure is the model of the physical process of tossing a coin. But we have to verify the model empirically. We carry out a long series of tosses and make a record of the number of heads and the number of tails. If in a long series of tosses the result is approximately “one to one,” that is half the results are heads and half tails, and the longer the series of tosses the better the approximation, we have the right to say that our model is working properly.

Note, however, that whether or not the model is good depends on the world and what it is like. In the mathematical probability theory we may ascribe any measures we like to the various subsets, provided their sum equals one. But it is observation, in other words what the world is like, that determines whether the selection of the measure of ½ for each of the two subsets is correct.
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Let’s now take a look at this in the light of the concept of creation as presented in the previous chapters. God thinks mathematically. In creating the world He implements certain mathematical structures as the structure of the world (of course the mathematical structures we have discovered are merely very rough approximations to the structures which God uses in His thinking). The fact that probabilities observed in our world assume specific values is part of God’s “creative concept.”

Let’s now go back to the question of chance as God’s “competitor” or “rival.” If by chance or random occurrence we mean an event with a very low probability which nonetheless does happen, or in other words an event to which we should ascribe a low probability measure in the given set of events, then in the light of what we have said above such an event is still part of God’s “creative concept.” Therefore chance events are also “fully controlled” by God.

Thinking of random occurrence in opposition to God is tantamount to treating standard probability theory as an absolute, that is putting it above and beyond God’s control. We feel intuitively that anything that occurs frequently (viz. it is highly probable a priori) does not need to be explained. But anything that happens rarely (viz. it is not very probable a priori) is either a chance occurrence or else has been specially contrived by someone. But as we have seen, a low probability is not a sort of anti-absolute in opposition to God, but part of His creative strategy. Furthermore, there are other probability theories in mathematics different from the standard one described in this chapter. For instance, in statistical quantum mechanics and quantum field theories a generalised probability theory is used,
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and recently free probability theory has been developing rapidly.
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And it is by no means obvious which of them (or perhaps some other probability theory) will be applicable at the deepest level of the structure of the universe.