Question 6: Is there an answer? Part One.

Disclaimer: this post threatens to meander deep into the territory of bitter instant coffee and meagre jazz cigarettes.

Ages ago I said that science is all about the models, not about absolute truth. A scientific model is one thing, the thing that it models is quite another. It's not a case of "never the twain shall meet", but they are very definitely distinct.

I would argue that one absolutely crucial distinction is that models necessarily make sense. They have order and logic and they are predictable and clear and useful. (Obviously, the clarity of a particular model may depend on one's expertise in the area and the size of one's brain). If a model is not all these things then it is a poor model.

The same is not necessarily true of the thing being modelled. There is no obligation on the observable universe to 'make sense'. The universe does not need to have an "answer" in order for it to exist. Even if the human race, or any other sentient entity in the universe, never figures out exactly what the universe is and how it works, that won't stop the universe from existing.

Here is where it gets a little "instant coffee" ... apologies in advance if I accidentally use the word 'teleological' at any point. I like the word a lot more than the concept.

The human brain has evolved to cope with our environment. One way it does this is by creating simplified models of the outside world to allow us to predict the way the world works. The outside world is much too complicated to analyse in precise detail at every step. Every tree is different, but the brain can filter out the differences and recognise a tree as a tree. Conversely, every human face is remarkably similar, but the brain can easily tell them apart. These are capabilities that we take for granted, but, when you analyse them, they're pretty remarkable. The brain, in effect, superimposes simpler and more useful models and does its "thinking" with these models rather than with what it directly observes of the world. It is a cheat, but it means we don't have to carry our brains around in wheelbarrows. And it means if we have ten boxes of ten apples each, we don't need to count every single apple to know we have a hundred apples.

Science is an extension of this natural talent. We have re-used our capacity to form intuitive models of our immediate environment in order to form more and more abstract models of the universe. But the origin of these models and this method is our brain and its method of dealing with the outside world.

This is not to suggest that all our models "make sense" purely because we invented them. There is apparent order in the world. When we compare our models with the observable universe, they match to a very useful degree. But they never match exactly. And we can conceive of things within these "simple" models that do not (and cannot) exist in the "real" universe ... infinite numbers, perfect Platonic solids, the humble pi.

Plato himself found this a bit of a headache, and his brain probably did need carrying around in a wheelbarrow. Keen readers may want to read (or read up on) Plato's Republic and the allegory of the cave. Very keen readers may want to have a look at some Hume too. (I studied philosophy at a Scottish University so I may be recommending Hume in order to spread the pain ... but I would like to think it's more generous than that)

Stumbling finally to my point: we cannot argue that the the fact that the Universe "makes sense" means that we require a knowing creator because the Universe does not necessarily make any sort of sense at all. There is no necessity for an answer so there is no necessity for an entity asking the question.

There ... and I didn't mention Telly Savalas once.

Question 5: Good luck or good management? Part Three.

A quick summary of parts one and two.

(I could pretend this is for the benefit of the reader but it is mainly because I've been very lazy updating the blog and need to remind myself what I'm talking about)

Important point number one: You cannot dismiss a model on subjective grounds. A model is not less valid because you (or any number of other people) do not like it. A model is not less valid because it contradicts a piece of dogma or accepted wisdom. A model is not less valid because it appears to be complicated. A model is not less valid because it appears counter intuitive.

Important point number two: The scientific method is objective and is open to everybody. There is no grand conspiracy within 'science' to exclude particular beliefs or ideas. The criteria for a scientific model are objective and do not depend upon the prejudices of the existing scientific community. If a model can be clearly expressed and can be tested then it is, in the broadest sense of the term, science. If the model is useful (by my slightly non-standard definition of the term) then it is good science.

Good luck or good management?

Back to the post title and back even further to my earlier definition of God.

One of the fundamental characteristics of God is the role of creator. The assertion of the Old Testament is that, in some sense and to some degree, everything that currently exists was created by God. I want to avoid a discussion of the interpretation of Genesis and the specifics of how and when that creation took place and examine whether it is possible to prove or disprove the role in more general terms. Is there a role in our understanding of the observable universe that requires a conscious creator?

An aside on simplicity: in Important Point 1, I dismissed the idea that simplicity should be a guide to the validity of a model, but I'll dip into it briefly anyway. I'm nothing if not inconsistent. A seemingly simple explanation for any complicated observation is "God did it". It is certainly short and pithy, but that is not the same as simple. The explanation "God did it" is only simple if we assume a priori that God exists. If you do not make this assumption, then the explanation for something complicated becomes "Something even more complicated did it." Which is hardly satisfactory. If you combine it with the common reasoning that God must exist because complicated and amazing things exist, then the argument becomes circular: How do you explain the complexity of the universe? God did it. How do you know God exists? Because the universe is complicated.

A conscious creator in science.

None of the current set of models for how we came to be here include a role for a conscious creator. The model of natural selection does not require any intelligent and deliberate input to explain the evolution of the current gamut of life on earth. The stars and planets do not require a conscious hand to explain their positions and movements. To my knowledge, there is no common scientific model for anything that requires a creator.

This is not a concerted and deliberate omission; science has arrived, over the course of a couple of centuries of subjective application of an objective method, at a set of models that simply do not require a creator. There is no gap in the models that can be usefully and testably filled by a creator. The models do not match with observation better if you include a creator somewhere within them.

Now ... science does not know everything. But it can, in principle, model anything, and everything that science has currently modelled works perfectly well without a creator. There is no evidence and, more importantly, no need for a creator.

We are here, to the very best of our understanding, entirely by accident.

A further interlude: a bit on truth

Having promised myself not to get involved in any instant coffee student philosophy discussions, I'm going to have to tread quite carefully around this. But Robin poked me on the subject and it does merit some thought. This still officially counts as an interlude ... I am loathe to attempt to formally define or question the concept of 'truth'. And I have previously stated that for current purposes, I'm assuming science is not a list of absolute facts (or truths).

The earth is flat.

What do we mean when we say something is true or false? I mentioned the flat earth model earlier so let us start with that. The statement "The earth is flat" is definitely false. (False is much easier to spot than true.) Here is a collection of photos of the earth taken from space. Conspiracy theorists may wish to dispute their veracity ... but not with me. Thanks all the same.

A flat earth model is very useful if you are building a house, but architects using the flat earth model know that the earth isn't actually flat. I hope.

What about the statement "The earth is round"? If you were pedantic to the point of being antisocial, you might argue that strictly speaking the earth is an oblate spheroid and not perfectly round at all. Is the statement still true? It's fairly accurate. It's probably the best single syllable description of the shape of the earth. It's not as if 'round' is a strictly-defined geometric term in any case. Biscuits are round. People's heads are round. Round-ish.

So in common usage 'true' and 'false' are not absolute black and white concepts.

The earth is 7000 years old.

Some biblical literalists use the creation stories in the Old Testament to assert that the earth is only six or seven thousand years old. Some will even couch this assertion in scientific terms and claim it can be supported by a legitimate use of the scientific method. A quick google will bring up a number of such papers.

This assertion is false. Uncontroversially and incontrovertibly false. This model of the earth's history is contradicted by a truly massive weight of evidence. It is as easily falsifiable as the suggestion that the earth is flat.

Note that this does not instantly disqualify it from being a scientific model. As I said earlier:

"Scientific models and theories are not 'true' or 'false'. They are 'useful' or 'not useful' in particular contexts."

and

"Science is a set of well-defined models that can be tested against observation."

If you can find a context where the assumption that the earth is 7000 years old has an application, and you can express it in terms that allow it to be tested against observation in that context, then it will become a useful scientific model.

I will buy an iPod for the first person who can give me an example of a context where this assertion is useful and a method for testing it. Any size and colour you like. The answers "to prove the literal truth of Genesis" and "by reading the word of God" will receive a mystery booby prize.

So ... being demonstrably false does not stop something from being science; failing to satisfy the simple criteria of a scientific model and not applying the scientific method stops something from being science.

I have no idea if this satisfies Robin's qualms about "true" versus "useful". I'm sure he'll tell me.

A light-ish interlude.

OK. The last entry was possibly a step and a half. And the final assertion that "nothing that exists is 'outside' science" is something of a brainful. So this post is a gentle meander around the idea until I'm happier with it.

Bud has made an interesting comment:

"... modeling anything with science is, in itself, a leap of faith"

This is worth dwelling on. It's an important part of understanding the difference between the scientific method and a scientific model, and between a model and reality itself.

A model is a leap of faith. You are being asked to accept that what the model tells you is the same as what you would experience in Real Life. Take the seemingly simple example of numbers and arithmetic. As a young child, you are taught to accept that the sum "5 + 3" is comparable to adding five apples to three bananas. You are asked to believe that every single time you bring together five apples and three bananas they will always combine to make eight pieces of fruit.

This is a leap of faith or an act of belief. See the previous posts on belief in science and a belief in belief.

Two things turns this act of belief into a scientific model. Firstly, the model is expressed in a way that is comprehensible and useful. The vast majority of human beings can be taught basic numeracy and can apply it in extremely useful ways to Real Life. Secondly, the model is expressed in such a way that it is testable. We can compare the results that the model of numbers and basic arithmetic give us, with the results that we observe in Real Life. We can go out and buy five bananas and three apples and we can put them together and count them and (fortunately for us) every single time we will count eight pieces of fruit.

Pure Mathematics

While we're meandering and talking about arithmetic, let us take a brief stroll through the scented meadows of Pure Mathematics. Some people don't even label pure maths as a science. Even the term 'pure' has a strange, un-sciency feel to it. Here's what wikipedia has to say about it:

"Broadly speaking, pure mathematics is mathematics motivated entirely for reasons other than application."

Which is more a definition of what it isn't than what it is. Essentially, pure maths takes the 'useful' part of our definition of a scientific model and puts it to one side. It still takes a model and expresses it in comprehensible terms (comprehensible to other pure mathematicians, that is), but it does not care whether the results are applicable to the Real World.

Let's take the schoolboy favourite concept of an infinite number. There is a finite amount of 'stuff' in the universe. So the concept of an infinite amount of something is, to all intents and purposes, entirely useless. At the same time, it is an extremely cool idea (well ... to pure mathematicians and schoolboys at least). Pure maths is built upon piles and piles of extremely cool but generally useless things.

There are of course exceptions. The simple ends of pure mathematics are useful: numbers and geometry for example. Many other abstract and 'pure' mathematical models have turned out to have application in the Real World, although typically they become useful decades or centuries or even millennia after they are first investigated 'for fun'.

Intuition

Intuition is great. The human brain has the capacity to observe the world and make lightning fast decisions about what is happening and what is likely to happen. We can throw and catch a ball without performing any complicated calculus to work out its trajectory. We can distinguish between faces and voices from objectively tiny differences. We can store and recall and relate information about things with unlikely speed.

But intuition has a very definite limit. The human brain works on a human scale. If you go very far outside that scale, either very much bigger or very much smaller, then intuition falls down. Things become quite literally 'strange'.

Take symmetry as an example. Symmetry is an intuitive concept. Imagine you take a square of plain white paper and place it in front of you. You can turn it through a quarter, a half, or three quarters of a turn (90°, 180°, 270°) and it will appear the same. You can reflect it in a mirror and it will still appear the same. It has some symmetry.

Now, I used the word "imagine" there for a reason. You don't actually have to take a square of paper. You know these things from experience and intuition. You've seen a square before. You know how squares work. You can imagine the same process with a rectangle or a triangle or any number of familiar shapes and you would understand how their symmetry worked.

There is a simple model of symmetry in a branch of pure maths called Group Theory (no wiki link as it would confuse more than anything else). It provides a formal model for what we understand intuitively about symmetry. But, because it is pure maths and not bounded by a need to relate to the Real World, it goes some steps further and provides a formal model for aspects of 'symmetry' that are utterly outside our intuitive understanding. It can, for example, model the idea of an object that needs to be turned around twice (720°) before it looks the same. Clearly, that makes no sense at all for our intuitive understanding of the physical world.

Except (either beautifully or irritatingly, depending on your perspective), there is an application for this bizarre and unintuitive model in Quantum Mechanics. It is counter intuitive because it is not on a human scale, but it is still useful. And I'm definitely not linking to the wikipedia article here since the page acknowledges itself that "All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear."

So:

• a scientific model is a leap of faith: the scientific method requires you to TEST the model
• pure maths is only science-ish since it investigates models for their own sake
• a model does not need to be intuitive to be useful or scientific

Corollary: do we believe in science?

While we're on the subject of belief, and in keeping with the general theme of meandering up and down side roads rather than heading straight to the point, a bit about belief and science.


I blithely stated here that science is not a belief system. Given that I also made the statement that belief is not enough, I probably ought to justify myself. I'm burdened with a few ounces of integrity.


It is often argued that accepting scientific claims requires belief and that this makes it comparable with other more conventional systems of belief like theism. But 'belief' is a many splendoured thing; it means a dozen things in a dozen contexts. We need to be very clear about what we mean by 'belief' in science before we make such a comparison.


Science exists.


OK. That should be fairly uncontroversial. It is equivalent to the "Elvis exists" example from earlier. When we say "I believe in science" we are not saying "I believe in the existence of science." So the statement "I believe in science" is not comparable with the statement "I believe in God" by this meaning of "believe".


Science is useful.


I would argue that when we say "I believe in science" we are instead using the other meaning of "I believe in the capabilities or qualities of science". We are stating that we believe that the scientific method is a useful tool.


Do we need to justify that belief? Is it subjective or controversial?


The scientific method is the set of tools and techniques by which we have created every piece of technology and every branch of medicine in the modern world. It has demonstrated its efficacy over centuries of almost alarmingly rapid progress. It quite clearly and unequivocally works. I genuinely cannot imagine any way in which this massive body of evidence can be regarded as either subjective or controversial.


But ... I'm going to allow it to be considered controversial. Just for the time being and for the purposes of this discussion. That's how generous I am. I am going to allow that the statements "I believe in Science" and "I believe in God" are comparable within this particular meaning of "believe".

Corollary to the corollary.

Thanks to Robin for pointing out a further clarification that needs to be made.

There is an important difference between the scientific method and a scientific model. The method is a method, a way of doing something. A very successful way of doing something. A model or theory is just a part of that method: an idea that pops out of a person's brain and is proposed as a useful model of some part of the observable world. Newton's idea of gravity was a model. How Newton expressed that model and tested it against observation is the scientific method.

So, there is another use of 'believe' that we should address.

I believe in a particular scientific model.

Again, this is not equivalent to "I believe in the existence of a particular scientific model". Reference libraries are chock full of journals crammed with scientific models. They definitely exist.

What is actually meant is "I believe in the utility of a particular scientific model". I think it is a good model. I think it agrees with what I observe in the outside world. I think it can tell me something useful that I have not yet observed in the outside world. As I said down there somewhere, models themselves are not true or false, so this phrase should not be interpreted as "I believe a particular scientific model is true".

Very importantly, the phrase "I believe in science" is not equivalent to "I believe in all scientific models". For one thing, scientists quite often disagree. Disagreement is an important part of advancing understanding. You cannot (honestly) claim to believe in every single scientific model since they do not necessarily agree with one another.

Definition 2: Science

A brief aside whinge about Science.

'Science' is a term that is much abused and misunderstood. Perhaps not as much as the term 'God' ... but it's not been around for quite as long and is doing its best to catch up.

If I mention science anywhere in this blog then this is what I mean. You may not agree with this definition, but it's the one I'm using and I'm the one doing the typing.

• Science is a set of well-defined models that can be tested against observation.

That's it. Well almost. I'll expand a bit after this partial list of things that science is not:

• a list of absolute facts


• a system of belief


• the stuff that makes the universe work


• a conspiracy of wicked men trying to kill God

What do I mean by 'a model'? Tricky one. Something that looks a bit like the thing it is modelling but is simpler and easier to work with. A globe is a model of the earth. Gravity is a model of how things fall down. Euclidian geometry is a model of how shapes fit together. The important thing is that models are not the same as the things they are modelling. Physics is not 'how the universe works', physics is 'a model of how the universe works'.

What do I mean by 'well-defined'. Trickier one. Something is well-defined if somebody other than its inventor can understand it according to some shared language and rules. This is the difficult bit of science that can lead to impenetrable jargon and funny-looking equations. You can describe a scientific model in plain English; the short-hand simply allows you to state it in a lot fewer pages.

What do I mean 'can be tested against observation'. This bit should be self-explanatory. A scientific model should tell you 'stuff' about the 'thing' that it models. You need to be able to compare the stuff the model tells you with the stuff that you can observe directly from the thing itself. If you can't compare one with the other then it is not a very good model, is it?

THIS NEXT BIT IS IMPORTANT.

Scientific models and theories are not 'true' or 'false'. They are 'useful' or 'not useful' in particular contexts. That is, they either tell you something useful and accurate about the thing they are modelling, or they don't.

Example 1: the world is flat

Hopefully everybody reading this thinks the above statement is 'false'. However, it is the model of the world used by the architects and engineers designing almost every building on the planet. Because it is useful in that context.

Example 2: Newtonian or Classical mechanics

This is an 'old' model of how objects move and interact. It is perfectly useful in almost all human-scale contexts. You can put a man on the moon with Newtonian mechanics. However, there are things that we observe about the universe that do not look like the Newtonian model. So we have to think up a new model that matches these observations. This does not make the model FALSE, it simply means it has a finite utility. It doesn't model everything.

The job of science is to test the models it has already invented until they break. And then invent some new ones to pick up the pieces.

When people dismiss science with the argument that 'science often gets things wrong' they are only partly correct. Science always gets things wrong. That's how science works.