Two particular things have sparked recent tirades from me:
1) People, religious and non, making a fuss over whether or not Steven Hawking believes in God.
2) "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" which I picked up over the weekend, thinking it was a book on physics, and discovering that it's full of all sort of mystical hoo-doo instead.
Can we just stop mingling this religion and science business? This thing is getting old.
Once I was on the sideline of a debate whether Einstein, saying, "God does not play dice with the universe" was religious. My answer to that is, "Who cares?" What does it matter if Einstein believed in God or not? Why do people think that adding a Very Smart Person to the ranks of believers gives religion (or anything really) a leg up? Does it work for other things? If Einstein believed his mother had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a otherwise indistinguishable genetic clone, would everyone be jumping on the bodysnatchers bandwagon?
My point is, the reason we have these debates is because God is not within the realm of science and by that, I mean, God is not a testable phenomenon. No one has yet devise an experiment that can produce evidence of God or evidence of not-God. Saying that the universe can exist without God is the same thing as asserting that a mighty breeze caused the Red Sea to part. That is fine. There is a plausible, ordinary explanation for everything. I don't have a problem with people who think we live in a universe where a God figure is unnecessary. Just don't insist to me that means God doesn't exist. Because at that point, you're not talking science anymore, you have moved into the realm of religion and it is as religious to say there is no God as it is to assert there is one.
Let me move away from the God Question to explain what I mean by "religious". String theory is, at this point in time, also religious. It has its believers. For them, it is the heavenly ray of light penetrating the dark at the extreme edges of our mathematical understanding. I recently read a very excellent book called "Zero:The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife (which, unlike the "Wu Li Masters" I am about to rail against, is an actual book on science and while it discusses the religious proclivities of the various scientists it mentions, it doesn't bother to try to make sense of the God Question). Right now, Newtonian and quantum physics, don't exactly gel with each other. What happens at the scale of the infinitesimally tiny appears to be very different from what happens at the scales we are familiar with (and the scale of the absurdly large, such as those of the plants and the stars, etc.). Notably, Seife points out that Newtonian physics fails not just as the mass of a thing approaches zero, but also as it approaches what we might properly call "infinity", as much as we understand that concept. The idea of a black hole, and why it gives modern physics so much trouble, is that the mass of this object is so absurdly high, beyond even what we can comprehend, that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light.
Why do these things throw Newtonian physics for a loop? Because of the polar ends of computation: zero and infinity. These two "numbers" cause many ordinary mathematical operations to fail. Adding a division by zero into a mathematical proof will allow you to prove anything to be true (Seife includes a proof that Winston Churchill is a carrot in the book's appendices). Reaching the state of "infinity" explodes out operations. They are nonsensical at a scale without limit.
The point of this is that String theory was created to eliminate the zeros. A black hole might rightly be considered an infinitely dense dot, having zero dimension, in space. Those ideas of "infinite" and "zero" make understanding what happens inside a black hole impossible. We cannot calculate it. String theory (and this is an extremely basic explanation) adds more dimensions to something that appeared to have zero dimensions before. When you're no longer dealing with zeros, the math comes out and rather prettily, too.
The only problem is that String theory cannot be tested. It is an experimental void. That is why it is religious at this point. You either believe in it or you don't. No one can yet demonstrate whether or not these strings actually exist.
You can see at this point why someone, using a lack of testable data, would be out of line to call String theory untrue, as opposed to just saying it isn't testable. And it is as ridiculous to say that String theory is bogus as it is to say that God does not exist. Get the idea of non-testable? Cannot be tested. That means it cannot be proved one way or the other.
I am both a religious person and one who is deeply interested in many of the sciences and I get very tired of this debate. Much of the history of science entailed Very Smart People trying to use their current scientific understanding to actually prove the existence of God (Pythagoras, another VSP as most people would agree, pushed the earth-centric theory of the cosmos: it was mathematically correct for the observable data at the time, and required God to be the one spinning the outermost sphere). As you may have guessed, that failed. Now it seems we want to go in the opposite direction, pushing current scientific understanding to disprove the existence of God. A word to nervous religious people everywhere, this will fail, too.
Here is my advice to everyone:
1) Religious people need to chill out. Just because a VSP makes an out-sized pronouncement about the necessity of God, it doesn't mean you have to get worked up about it.
2) Scientists ought to stop poking the religious people and get back to their work.
Enough about scientists who want to inject God, yay or nay, into something that is mathematical and nothing more--Hawking, I'm looking at you--I want to talk now about religious people who want to co-opt science for making pronouncements that amount to religion.
"The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics" by Gary Zukav appears to do just that. I admit that I'm not very far into it and I plan to finish it just because it is unfair to judge a book by a single chapter, but as Nate will tell you, I am having a hard time getting through it because I stop every other page or so to rant loudly about its logical leaps.
There is something about Eastern mysticism that gets really excited whenever "quantum"ness is brought up. Maybe because quantum physics are so poorly understood, it is easy to co-opt its terminology. Quantum simply means a very small thing, something so small that is perhaps not even detectable or observable. But we have detected and observed at least some of these "quanta", what we now think of as electrons, protons, photons, etc. and their behavior is odd. They are so small, they don't appear to obey Newtonian physics as we understand it. In fact, they are so small that just the act of observing them changes them (or maybe even creates them) so that we cannot simultaneously measure all their properties. They are so wacky that it actually appears that they blip in and out of vacuums, creating what is called "zero point" energy that can push two plates together in a place where nothing should exist.
What does any of this have to do with religion? Nothing. That's my point. Just as the Big Bang does not exclude God, quantum mechanics does not find Him. Listen to how Wukav tries to expand even Newtonian physics into some kind of Great Machine that excludes free will:
"Newton's laws of motion describe what happens to a moving object. Once we know the laws of motion, we can predict the future of a moving object, provided we know certain things about it initially...the ability to predict the future based on a knowledge of the present and the laws of motion gave our ancestors a power they had never known. However, these concepts carry within them a very dispiriting logic. If the laws of nature determine the future of an event, then given enough information, we could have predicted our present some time in the past...In short if we are to accept the mechanistic determination of Newtonian physics--if the universe really is a great machine--then from the moment that the universe was created and set into motion, everything that was to happen in it already was determined...Everything, from the beginning of time, has been predetermined, including our illusion of having a free will."
It is true that given enough information about my initial position, the force I exert, the mass of a ball, etc. you can predict where that ball will go if I throw it. But there is not enough information in the world that will allow you to predict whether I'm going to suddenly change my mind and throw it at your head (unless perhaps I'm Elin just finding out about Tiger...) The reason why is because we don't have mathematical laws for behavior. Newton's laws of motion are for motion. When you go past the concept that we can calculate ball trajectory (or planetary motion or anything other such thing) and begin to wonder "Wow. What about free will?" you have left the realm of science and are firmly in religious/philosophical territory. It is fine to philosophize about free will. But don't pretend that you got to that place in Newton's car.
Zukav goes on to talk about quantum mechanics and turns the very real speculation that observation might actually be an act of creation into something overwrought again: the invention of our own "reality", which he doesn't bother to define. Then the book stomps off again in search of metaphysical answers and the reader is forced along, even if all they wanted to know about was particle physics.
It might seem silly to criticize "Wu Li Masters", considering that it is an older book (published in 1979, only two years after I was born(!)) and because much of the actual physics discussed in it is sound (as Zukav points out, he had several physicists review each scientific assertion in his book for its accuracy). The problem is that quantum physics doesn't answer the questions that Zukav wants to explore. It can't. Adherents of so-called "quantum mysticism" might point out that many of the founders of quantum mechanics, such as Schroedinger and Heisenberg, were interested in its philosophical implications. Again, I say, "Who cares?" Then they were philosophers, too. VSPs can be both. It does not give either their science or their religion a leg up.
Essentially, my point boils down to this: we are unique and interesting creatures with a lot of questions about who we are, where we came from, and what the heck is the area under a curve? Science came into being for us to explore the testable questions we had about our world. Religion remains for that which is not testable, which can only be accessed by feeling and thought. Why do we get so worked up trying to tie the two together when they are clearly the matter/anti-matter combo of human experience?
Fairly recently, my son came home talking about "cavemen", which is about as much as a second grader can understand about evidence of ancient primitive humanoids. After some time, he realized the disconnect between what he had heard in school and the Adam and Eve story he knew from church. He wanted to know how they were related. I told him they weren't. "School is about things we have found out through discovery and experimentation. It is right as long as the discovery is real and the experimentation is well-founded," I told him. "Church is about trying to be like God and understanding what He wants for us to do here on earth. That pretty much boils down to loving each other." I told him it was okay to believe both in "cavemen" and Adam and Eve, even if they seem contradictory. "We haven't reached the end of our understanding," is all I said.
Now an explanation like that is likely to get up the hackles of some nonreligious, who think we only ought to only believe in and discuss what can be tested, and the hackles of some religious, who think we ought to fight evolution and any sort of scientific understanding that conflicts with the Bible or some other religious text. I have to believe it's because we are inherently logical and we want to tie up the things we experience in a beautiful mobius strip where one side is science and the other is religion and then they are one continuous band. I'm of the philosophy that someday we will, but maybe not in mortality.
Let me put it this way: if God exists, He is not threatened by science and we ought not to restrict our scientific exploration because we are afraid of where our God will go.
*An addendum*
Now that I've gone through an entire blog post using the term "science" like a catch-all, I really wish we could throw the word "science" away and come up with something new. The way it seems to get used these days is ridiculous, thrown back and forth across political spectrums like a hot potato. One side says, "You're anti-science!" LOB and then the other side catches it and says, "No YOU'RE anti-science", lobbing it back, "science" here appearing to mean "the conglomerate of all ideas that are true".
With the exception of theories that have been backed by mathematical proofs, science does not deal with truth. It deals with what is probable. Science is about statistics and whether or not an experiment has yielded a statistically significant difference, meaning something that is beyond mere coincidence.
Things are complicated. All things--the universe, the earth, people both in groups and individuals....everything is complicated. Devising an experiment that can isolate specific testable phenomena is the hardest part of a scientific endeavor. Correctly interpreting the raw data you gain from such an experiment ranks right below that in difficulty. A big part of becoming a scientist is learning how to do these two things. Some scientists do it well, others don't. Even VSPs can create a faulty experiment, tamper with data, and a defend a conclusion that may not be right.
Science is not a conglomerate and it is not true. It is perfectly fine to be "anti-science" if the science in question isn't sound. But, really, it's silly to lob that term around as if it actually means something. Give "science" a break. After all, as I just pointed out, it can't be God.
