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.
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20 comments:
What you seem to have said there, in a roundabout way, is "the non-existence of God makes no sense", with the added caveat that just because something doesn't make sense doesn't mean it isn't true.
Now that's the sort of thing I expect to hear from Gnostic Evangelicals, albeit with quite the opposite conclusion, but at least we have finally reached some common ground, even if we have also reached an apparent impasse.
Of course no matter how much sense our working models of the Universe make, there is always that possibility that there is something senseless lurking round the corner. But to say so would be unfalsifiable, untestable, and useless.
Science really very much relies on the assumption that there isn't anything in the Universe that defies logic in order to justify its ongoing campaign against mysticism and superstition, and now an atheist and scientist seriously hypothesises the existence of something that makes no sense, without any empirical evidence, in order to justify a philosophical stance.
I hope I don't seem to have said that, as it is just about the last thing I intended to say. I'm not even sure I understand where you have got that summary from.
Just to be absolutely clear: I do not think that the non-existence of god makes no sense, I hoped I made it clear that the fact that our models make sense implies nothing about whether the Universe itself makes sense, and I do not accept that science makes (or needs to make) any assumption about the logic or otherwise of the Universe.
I'm slightly baffled.
I certainly don't accept that science is engaged in a "campaign" against mysticism, superstition or anything else. The scientific method is a positive method for discovery, not a negative movement against belief. The dismissal of some aspects of belief is simply a by product of removing redundancy and disproving preconception.
I think "making sense" is sufficiently ambiguous that you can have a lot of cross-purpose discussion. A filing system can make sense in a different way to a plan of action.
I *think* what's being said is that insofar as the Universe is at some level of abstraction regular and predictable, science (makes sense of/orders) it. This doesn't imply that there is (sense/purpose) to its or our existence, though.
It would be hard to argue that there is no order to the Universe, given that science has given us the computers and international communications to have internet debates about it.
Short of divine revelation or de facto pronouncements*, though, "purpose" is not a field that can be tested, and I'm not sure it can even formulated in any useful way. Unless we're cogs in a Douglas Adams-esque computer, of course.
*let's assume they're different.
I chose "makes sense" deliberately and put it in quotes deliberately. It was apparently a poor choice. We can make sense of our experience of the immediate surroundings because our brains developed to make sense of them. We can make sense of the broader universe by using the same capacity of our brains but in a more abstract way.
There is apparent order in the Universe, in that aspects of it match to varying degrees with our (intentionally) ordered models.
This does not imply that order or "making sense" is a requirement on the Universe.
There is also a tremendous amout of disorder in the universe.
The fact we're communicating electronically is quite a good example. It's only ordered and digital down to a certain point; underneath it is all analogue, baby. It's only because we have imposed order and logic onto the electromagnetic chaos that we're able to communicate.
Purpose is a slightly different thing and possibly for "Part Two".
Ok I was heavily paraphrasing. I don't expect you meant it that way, but that's what it seems to imply to me. You are hypothesising that the Universe doesn't "make sense" (or have an underlying order) in order to avoid coming to my conclusion.
Anyway. The Universe does make sense at least as much as our models of it, in order for those models to have any sort of predictive power. You can't predict something that doesn't behave in an ordered manner, unless you are to suggest that it happens completely by chance every single time, which is highly unlikely. It's fairly certain to me that the Universe IS ordered at least as far as science is useful in it. A hundred years or so ago, scientific predictions were largely restricted to the likes of trajectories and the specific values of measurable variables. These days, often predictions are made of completely unseen phenomena that turn out to be true. And there's nothing mystical about the whole process. The original hypothesis that results in it is usually something very much along the lines of "the Universe makes sense". Special relativity and particle physics, for instance, all come from the statement "the laws of physics* are always the same". Now if that doesn't "make sense", I don't know what does.
(* the word "physics" here seems to refer to the way the Universe actually behaves, rather than just the way we model it; it is a hypothesis about the Universe, not about models.)
Whether we will one day discover something that science actually can't usefully model remains to be seen. I predict that it will never happen, but if it ever does just imagine how excited the Catholic Church will get about it. I don't think your escape plan is quite that easy...
As for whether it is "necessarily" ordered, right the way to the bottom, well, actually, yes it is. Apart from the empirical finding, so far, that nothing unnecessary ever happens. As much as you may be well to say that the Universe wouldn't stop existing if it stopped making sense, but I put it to you that it would never have existed in the first place. Why would it? You're not actually removing the question here, you're just changing it from "why does the Universe make sense" to "why does it not make sense", or even "how can something that defies logic exist?".
As for evolution... the reason we evolved such mental capacities is because they are useful for survival in the world. The ability to make sense of the world is only beneficial in a world that actually does make at least a bit of sense. And as much as the human brain is predisposed to pattern matching, science is not the same as seeing rabbits in the clouds, and it is well developed enough to know the difference between correlation and causality, even if that does go over the heads of newspaper science correspondents.
Oh and that thing about the campaign against mysticism, maybe I got a bit emotional there but all this New Age stuff really winds me up. Of course science doesn't have a "campaign", although it occasionally has that effect. Scientists do quite often make a point of debunking such things, as much good as it does.
I don't disagree with the idea that the Universe appears to operate in an ordered manner. In fact, in an earlier post I asserted that science can potentially model anything, which implies that anything in the universe is sufficiently ordered that it can be usefully modelled.
But that is not the same as order being a requirement of the Universe.
The rigorous statement of the argument would be something like:
o order requires a designer
o the universe requires order
therefore:
o the universe requires a designer.
If the second premise is merely "the universe appears to have order" or "the universe can be predicted by models that have order" or "the universe makes sense to brains that developed to make sense of the universe" (hello telly savalas), then the conclusion no longer follows.
I think the first premise is even flimsier. But I thought I'd attack the tricky one first.
And in regard to the campaign against mysticism, I should probably have said that science shouldn't be involved in such a campaign.
Debunking of specific dangerous lies: yes. Unfocused attacks on a loosely defined sets of beliefs and traditions: not really the remit of science.
/pure personal preference
The first premise is indeed the real problematic one, but let's look at the second again. I actually approach it from both directions, that is, "nothing illogical exists" and "there is a reason for everything" are really fundamental principles of my thinking, and from the other end "the Universe is actually observed to be logical". Since you're only addressing the second option there, I'll focus on that.
What we know for a fact is that we make models of the universe which are logical and ordered. You already said that in the main post. That doesn't of itself "prove" that the universe "needs" to be logical, but what you need to consider is that we are not separate from the Universe, we are really quite stuck in it and a result of it. These models that we come up with are also a result of the Universe, so if there is any order to the models, the Universe has resulted in something ordered. We could get into the semantics of whether those models are to be considered "in" the Universe or not, but I don't think that will really help. The point is, logic and order are coming out at one end, it's fairly safe to say there's logic going in at the other. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in computing. A complex system may emerge from a simpler one, but even a simple system doesn't emerge from no system at all. (That's probably a theorem, but I don't have the proof on me at the moment.)
The problem is very much with the first premise - "order requires a designer". The immediate problem is that the very word "designer" summons up an image of a man sat in front of an architect's drawing board. (Maybe he's got a long white beard as well.) It's quite anthropomorphic, even "physicomorphic" if I may coin a phrase. It leads us to think that this guy inhabits some sort of Superuniverse in which he will make our Universe, on some kind of Superlathe maybe. And then we get to wondering, who designed HIS world? And we can go on like that forever, only multiplying the original materialistic nonsense we started with.
This is where self-reference has to come in. We have to conceive an axiomatic system that emerges from ITSELF. Head-bending stuff, but this is what Turing machines are all about. Incidentally, and I will keep coming back to this as a useful analogy, Conway's Game of Life is actually Turing Complete. You can create logic gates in it and everything. That means you can make Conway's Game of Life, IN Conway's Game of Life. (If you used a big enough board, in theory you could actually make Conway in it.)
Now here's where it gets really headbending. If the board was actually infinite, you could make another infinite board game inside it, and set it up the same way. This is the so-called "fixpoint" and it's important for another reason.
The thing about any system, such as the game of life, or a wave equation, is that if you start with a blank slate, nothing ever happens. You can stare at a guitar string for as long as you like, it isn't going to pluck itself. But this "fixpoint" provides a non-arbitrary, non-zero initial configuration of the system. It's necessarily non-zero if it's going to simulate itself.
"it's fairly safe to say there's logic going in at the other"
Why? Hume rejected this idea and, to my admittedly very incomplete knowledge, nobody has convincingly un-rejected it.
Your examples, however true and headbending, apply to axiomatic systems. They don't say anything about the Universe unless you can show that it is an axiomatic system.
I've met Conway a couple of times. He makes "normal" people feel like talking chimpanzees.
I don't know much about Hume other than Hume's Fork, and that appears to be self-refuting, as well as making quite an arbitrary distinction in the first place. I struggle to see the difference between a fact and an idea.
Anyway I already answered your question in the next two sentences. "Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in computing. A complex system may emerge from a simpler one, but even a simple system doesn't emerge from no system at all."
Provide a counter-example if you can, but don't say "the Universe" because that would be circular. And as much as there's no empirical proof that the Universe is an axiomatic system... there isn't an empirical proof of anything. Besides, it seems something of a tautology to me. What in the world is a non-axiomatic system? Total randomness? I've already said what I think about that.
Given that time and space are the universe, and vice versa, aren't things like "arises from" a little hard to use? Nothing happened *before* time 0.
As a brief aside, what is the order or logic of radioactive decay on the nucleic level? I thought it was "it just does. Sometimes." Though maybe I'm missing the point there, it's late.
You should have a look at Hume ... he's dry but brilliant. Properly brilliant.
Your self-quote doesn't answer the question, it just restates the assertion. And Hume refutes the assertion. There is no need for order to arise from order. Order can arise from disorder. Sometimes you put garbage in and get order out - that's essentially how life on earth appeared.
"What in the world is a non-axiomatic system?"
I have no idea ... you may have just invented it. The universe is not an axiomatic system. That's not the same as a "non-axiomatic system" (whatever that is). An axiomatic system is a human construct. It's a particular sort of order that we've invented or discovered. An axiomatic system is rather like a Platonic solid ... a lovely idea but not something that can actually exist. Gödel and Hilbert demonstrated that it can't exist.
The universe clearly isn't one because (unless we get into serious bitter coffee territory) it does actually exist.
I read Hume's Wikipedia entry. Or at least, I skimmed over it, not really quite so interested in his life history for instance. It seems no-one can actually agree on what he meant by anything!
As for the order from disorder, I see where you're coming from there, but it seems to me to be something of a confusion between a disordered initial state and a lack of ordering rules. Crystals are ordered and form from a disordered collection of atoms, but they don't form in absence of the "laws of nature". Neither does evolution happen without the natural order of the universe pre-existing. I could give you a set of random numbers and ask you to sort them into order, but the order would have come from you (or even from me), not from the numbers themselves or from their initial disordered state.
I also think you've misunderstood Goedel a bit there. It's the popular misconception that it somehow denies the existence of truth or objective reality. Not that it doesn't have some deep implications, but that isn't it. It's only proved it in the first place by using axioms, for one thing.
Maybe it's some sort of mental block on my part, but I just really can't fathom how any Universe could possibly exist except by the necessity of logic.
Rich:
No, but t=0 IS defined. Anyway time, as you say, is a feature of the Universe. The anthropomorphised notion of creation requires it, but logically "following" doesn't. It's a deceptive word because it summons up the notion of chronology.
I wondered when someone would bring up Quantum Mechanics! The Copenhagen Interpretation has it that Quantum events are literally random, although with a calculable probability. The structure of a nucleus determines the probability of decay, but you can never know exactly when it's going to go off. But there's the rub. "You can never tell" doesn't literally mean "it's random", that's just the standard interpretation of the model. It's caused a whole bunch of philosophical trouble. There are other interpretations that are indistinguishable experimentally, and some of them are deterministic. See, for instance, Bohm's interpretation. There's also a variant of the Copenhagen interpretation that sees the wavefunction as a real thing, as opposed to the usual idea that it is a mathematical construct. For some reason, physicists cling onto the notion that it's only the particles that are "real". In what way they differ from a mathematical construct I'm not sure, but they seem to prefer it that way round, even if they have to accept that they only exist when you look at them.
I also think you've misunderstood Goedel a bit there. It's the popular misconception that it somehow denies the existence of truth or objective reality.
That's not what I said. You introduced the concept of axiomatic systems. Goedel proved that a complete and consistent axiomatic system cannot exist. The universe does exist, therefore it cannot be a complete and consistent axiomatic system.
no, but sometimes people do say that.
An axiomatic system is under no obligation to be complete and consistent, and neither is the Universe. But that doesn't mean it isn't axiomatic. I've got no objection to the idea of the Universe not being "complete", and the strict definition of the word in this context is a bit on the abstract side.
And here's another thing. Does the Universe necessarily exist? Obviously we observe it to, but that's only after the event.
... so the universe does not require order.
I don't know which I enjoy more - your intelligent and well written posts or you and moon gt's calm, reasoned debates in the comments.
It's rare and delightful to see sensible discussion on the internet.
Moon gt is definitely one of the most insightful commentators from the theist camp I've read and his writing, even when I disagree with him, has given me real insights into the intelligent theist mindset.
Sam has a very clear and logical way of writing and even when he delves into philosophic concepts and writers beyond those the average literate man might have encountered he succeeds in doing so without coming across as patronising or superior.
This is beginning to sound like a book review so I'll shut up now and merely say thank you for this blog.
Moon - thanks for the leads into quantum philosophy, I'll follow them up. I'm curious, though, in what way is "you can't tell" different from "it's random", given perfect information? Randomness in decay isn't a result of imperfect knowledge due to the uncertainty principle, is it?
Rich, I remember my QM lecturer being adamant that the uncertainty principle does not mean you have uncertain knowledge, it's that there is no distinction between certain states of reality at that level. I don't know if that really answers your question, though.
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