Is there an answer? Part 2.

I got a bit diverted by the comments for Part 1, and may have to just cut'n'paste some of that discussion into this new post as I covered a lot of what I was going to say.

I'm still pretty happy with the claim that the Universe does not need to "make sense" or adhere to a strict set of rules. We observe order in the Universe, and scientific models need order, and for scientific models to be useful they need to match with observation of the Universe to a reasonable degree, but that does not imply that the Universe itself requires order.

(that may be the worst sentence I've ever written ... perhaps I need some revolting instant coffee)

So why bother attempting to argue something that culminates in such an ugly sentence? Because the requirement of order is one of the premises behind one of the most common arguments for the necessary existence of a creator. And the old testament God is defined to be such a creator.

The argument goes something like this (cut'n'paste):

• order requires a designer
• the universe requires order

therefore:

• the universe requires a designer

The second premise is often expressed in empirical a posteriori terms as "the universe appears to have order", in which case the first premise should also be expressed in empirical terms as "order appears to require a designer" and would lead to an empirical thesis of "the universe appears to require a designer". This is quite interesting in itself and may even warrant a "Part 3". It falls down quite rapidly, however, since science has shown that lots of the apparent order in the Universe does not appear to require a designer at all and is perfectly well explained by random, un-designed events.

If we take the argument in a priori terms, rather than empirical terms, then the second assumption "the universe requires order" seems fairly arbitrary. Scientific models require order ... almost by definition. I genuinely cannot see why the same definition should apply to the Universe.

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.

Question 4: Who created what?

An old man dies and his son buries him and plants a few apple seeds in the ground above. Some years later he passes by the burial plot and notices a small apple tree has grown. He tells his mother who picks some apples from the tree and bakes an apple pie.

Who made the pie?

Not exactly a sphinx-standard riddle: the mother made the pie.

But ... the apple tree made the apples. And the son planted the seeds that made the apple tree. And the father, rest in peace, fertilised the tree. And (for the sake of argument) Mary Ann Brailsford raised the first apple tree from which this particular Bramley variety derives. And an unidentified prehistoric farmer somewhere in central Asia originally domesticated the wild ancestor of the modern apple.

We could go back even further, but I think I've laboured the point enough: it is possible to argue half a dozen different 'creators' for something as simple as an apple pie. We need to narrow down what we mean. Which of these are comparable with God as the creator?

The apple tree: hopefully nobody will object if I discount this one. The biblical God is a conscious entity. This comparison might stretch to work if we were talking about 'Mother Nature', but we are not. God definitely isn't a tree.

The father: the apples are in part made out of the body of the father. He was the fertilizer that fed the tree. But that's not what we mean either. The Old Testament does not say that the universe is 'made out of' God. It is also fairly clear that God cannot die.

Mary Ann Brailsford and the mystery Kazakhstani farmer: we're arguably closer here. Both these people made deliberate efforts to create something. Although neither of them could have had any useful knowledge at the time that their efforts would one day lead to the making of this specific apple pie. And neither of them would live to witness the specific apple pie.

The son: again, the son made a deliberate effort to raise apple trees. And in this case, it is possible that he made that effort knowing that one day his mother could use those apples to make a pie.

The mother: made the pie.

Discounting the father and the tree, which of the remaining three is most comparable with how the Old Testament defines God as creator?

God created everything, but that does not narrow it down: all the apples came from the tree planted by the son, all Bramley apples come from Mrs Brailsford's tree and prior to that from the domestication of wild apples in central Asia.

Back to the source. The whole of the first chapter of Genesis is essentially of the form: "God said 'let there be X' and there was X and God saw that X was good".

(I'm reducing it to that simply to avoid any discussion of the translations or mistranslations of the various 'X', or the possible pedantic knots you can tie yourself in over the order and time in which they were created ... there is plenty of good reading on The Internet about the origins and interpretations of Genesis. It even allows for Genesis to simply be a model or metaphor for the actual creation process.)

This clearly discounts the historic origins of the apple as a comparison. Genesis states that God created each specific X and witnessed that it was 'good'. God did not simply set into motion a sequence of events without knowing what might eventually result.

So there are only two roles in the creation of the apple pie that are comparable with the role the Old Testament assigns to God in the creation of 'everything'. Either the son, who remotely put into progress a sequence of events that he anticipated would one day lead to some good pies. Or the mother, who knowingly made the specific pie in the story.

Definition 3: God part 2.

Back to God again. And back to the source (or as close as I can get to the source without learning a selection of bronze age middle eastern languages). There are clearly several other versions of the Old Testament in current use, but I don't have the resources to cross check every single one. I'm more than happy to take suggestions of variations and clashes in comments. For current purposes I am simply going to list the usual attributes of God and reference them to the appropriate bits of the King James version of the Old Testament.

Using Bartleby's excellent searchable reference books (one of the finer corners of the Internet) makes the task of finding the biblical definition of God easier. But still not very easy. As you might imagine, or know, the word "God" appears quite a lot in the old testament. The majority of these occurences are statements praising God, or advising God's followers how they ought to behave towards God, or reporting what God said or did, which helps to narrow it down.

In fact, there are relatively few direct statements about what God actually is. I haven't decided yet if that makes this job harder or easier.

The Eternal God

Arguably, one of the most fundamental qualities of God is that God has always existed and is not something that was created or came into being. (oh ... another nice feature of Bartleby is that it provides hyperlinked cross-references ... so if you find one statement in a reference, you can easily find related statements. Nice.)

Isaiah 44:6 "I am the first, and I am the last" and Isaiah 48:12 "I am he; I am the first, I also am the last". (according to Bartleby, this is also repeated in Revelations, but I'm only looking at the Old Testament).

That is fairly unequivocal as a statement: God existed before anything else.

The Creator

This one is easier. God is referred to as a creator in many many places.

Isaiah 40:28 "the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth"
Isaiah 45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

(I did look further than Isaiah, honestly. It is quite a good book though.)

And of course there is the whole of Chapter 1 of Genesis.

There are some slightly more equivocal statements which refer to God creating more specific and limited things like 'Israel' or 'righteousness', but overall the Old Testament has an uncontroversial position that God created everything.

An aside: there is a whole wealth of material on the internal consistency of the various creation stories in Genesis. I might delve into those at some point, but the intention at the moment is simply to list God's attributes and provide their biblical justification.

God the Trinity.

Happily, I've said that I am only using the Old Testament definition of God. The Trinity is one very good reason for doing that. It has spurned more brain aching theological debate than probably all other biblical questions combined and caused more splits in the church than anything else. It also narrows the scope to mainstream Christianity, as Judaism, Islam, and many smaller branches of Christianity do not accept that Jesus and God are one and the same. In short, I'm not touching it with a barge pole.