Dr. Evil is no scientist. Newton was, but he still got it wrong.

 Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He's not there at all.

            -  Charles Alfred Coulson, Science and Christian Belief

Today, I’d like to make something of a rejoinder to last week’s post, where I discussed the propensity of the human mind to boggle at the unknowable and its’ tendency to fill the void with what – to it – is at least comprehensible. It was a specific point about intellectual humility in the face of a mystery that may be genuinely unsolvable. Today I would like to make a distinction between this, and a superficially reasonable but ultimately misguided argument that sees any acknowledged gap in current knowledge as ripe for invoking supernature in natural explanations. Misguided for at least two reasons, which I’ll come to shortly. In discussing the second of these reasons, I’d also like to bring in a related style of argument: one that chalks off a region of the intellectual battlefield, and tries to limit discussion to where it thinks it has home-field advantage. It may not always be explicitly religious, but it is among the repertoire of those that feel their religious beliefs require them to engage on one side or another in a given empirical debate. As such, today’s post is going to be a bit longer than usual. But as it’s also likely to be my last for the year, so I hope you’ll indulge me: it is nearly Christmas after all. Here’s hoping you have a great Christmas and New Year, and thanks to all for reading and commenting. 

So, why misguided? Well, firstly, it’s worth considering that the disparaging term ‘God of the gaps’ was not created as an epithet to be hurled by non-believers. Rather, Christian writers – including the one quoted above – originated the concept to criticize what they saw as the belittling of god into an occasional wonderworker, constrained by the borders of human knowledge rather than immanent in the entirety of the cosmos and its natural processes. As they point out, such gaps have a tendency of closing. One example of this – which also serves to show that such an inclination is not only the province of small minds – concerns Sir Isaac Newton. Newton, among his many achievements, is credited for deriving his Universal Law of Gravitation from the fact that the planets orbit the sun not in perfect circles, but in ellipses. He showed how such ellipses would result from an attractive force – gravity – that operated in specific ways in relation to the masses in question and the distances between them. He rightly saw, however, that pull of the sun is not the only influence that should act on the planets and other orbiting bodies: they should also act upon one another. Failing to see how to reconcile such perturbations with the apparent stability of the solar system, not least of which the fact that the planets orbit within a fairly narrow plane, he invoked god to fine-tune the celestial system:  

   

"The […] Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. […] But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. […] This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." 

- Sir Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

In a sense, Newton was right. Planetary bodies do perturb one another, and these influences add up and cancel out in chaotic ways: indeed there are a number of scenarios that see such influences rendering dramatic changes to the solar system in the long term. What he failed to see was the relatively short period of human-scale time he was attributing stability to, and the development of ways in which – sans god – it might be explain materialistically. The orbital plane, for instance, is thought to be due to the way star systems coalesce out of nebulae that are themselves rotating, and flattens out into a disk as it does so. The point here is not that the modern forms of the nebular hypothesis are ‘proven’, or complete, or likely to be the final word on the subject. Rather, the point is the extent of the unknown has shrunk. By constraining your idea god to such dwindling foxholes you subject it to a death of a thousand cuts as the borders are inevitably tested at every place they can by incrementally advancing knowledge. 

The second way such piecemeal objections backfire is more subtle: it concerns the inevitable conceptual acrobatics required to shore them up against the shifting, combined weight of the facts they are subject to if they are to be credible as empirical explanations. Religious ideas – particularly those that hold dear the role of direct divine intervention in the phenomenal world – may be deeply and profoundly meaningful in the context of how a person chooses to view their place in the world. But ‘god did it’ has no explanatory power in an empirical context. What predictions arise from it? Under what conditions can it be falsified? By staking out some cherished problem with ‘Science’ as the home of your god, you’ve chosen the arena – physical phenomena – and the weapon – empiricism. You don’t then get to restrict the battle to only those facts that suit your case: if your god is touted as the solution to a scientific problem, then it has to bear the weight of the same facts subject to a godless explanation. Two topics that are controversial – but shouldn’t be – at least partly because of this brand of special pleading are evolution by natural selection, and anthropogenic climate change. 

It’s fairly easy to see why evolution by natural selection might be perceived as threatening by people who feel their doctrines insist upon an intelligent designer who undertook creation in the geologically recent past. Intelligent Design, distancing itself from the charge that it’s the respectable face of creationism, asks a seemingly reasonable question: is the apparent design evident in the adaptations of complex organic phenomena the result of a genuine intelligent designer or of a mindless statistical process. Seemingly reasonable because the evidence is usually in the form of ‘irreducible complexity’: some biological phenomena is held up as being too complex to have arisen by a gradual, accretory process. All the better if it’s intuitively difficult to see how each and every stage in that process could have conferred evolutionary advantage: the old “what good is half a wing” chestnut. In reality, Intelligent Design is the God of the Gaps writ small in the context of biology, and runs into trouble on exactly the same grounds. The human eye used to be a favorite example. But in the context of an extensive characterization of processes that might take one from the photosensitivity evident even in unicellular organisms to complex image forming optical instruments – possibly even multiple times in different taxa – this ground has been largely conceded. Apparently, they always were talking about the minutiae of biochemical reactions required for light sensitivity. Young Earth Creationism  provides a clearer example of the distortion and special pleading that becomes necessary when one has an a priori claim to defend. In a way, as its purpose is to justify a specific, literalist conception of the Genesis creation narrative it’s actually a better candidate as an empirical hypothesis in formal terms. This is because in contrast to the vague claims of Intelligent Design, Young Earth Creationism specifies the conditions under which it can be falsified. It makes quantitative claims about the age of the earth, the descent of all peoples from Noah’s family and the diaspora of human culture from a focal point at the Tower of Babel just a few short millennia ago. On the other hand, it’s this very specificity that requires it to tie itself in knots to try and maintain the illusion that these claims are not contravened by the available evidence. In proportion to the extent of empirical scaffolding that supports the scientific consensus on the age of the earth and other inconvenient truths, creationists need to tell ever more extensive just-so stories to justify their cherished conclusions. The list of required special dispensations is long, and doesn’t just contain the predictable anti-evolutionism which is its most common expression, but would have to include at the very least the cosmology of star and planetary formation, the physics of radioactivity, molecular genetics in general and human genetics in particular, paleobiology,  geology, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and so on. Again, the point here isn’t that the current model accepted by science is the revealed, singular truth and has it all explained. Modern evolutionary biology is a distributed, convergent discipline where a provisional, constantly evolving perspective draws on multiple lines of evidence and an array of data, to make testable claims about integrative, parsimonious mechanisms. Furthermore, I’m not claiming that religious belief requires opposition to the concept of evolution by natural selection: that the two are always and forever mutually incompatible. It’s just that, in the words of biologist and Russian Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Some do claim an incompatibility and choose not to identify their god with the grand sweep of nature and the symphony of its material processes. Instead, they make oddly specific and surely blasphemous claims that their god, who put the stars on their courses and gave electrons their quirks, ran out of ideas when it came to the hindquarters of certain beetles or the motive equipment of certain viruses.

“As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”

Genesis 8:22, The Holy Bible, New International Version

It’s harder to see what religion has to do with anthropogenic climate change.  One suspects religiously inspired resistance is due in part to the implication of a world with no one at the controls – a world whose rhythms and cycles can be sent spinning off course by human actions. At least in the debates I’ve engaged in, citing specifically scriptural reasons for the falsity of climate science is rare. But it does happen: in this video we can see American senators and representatives advancing the claim since god is at the wheel, and he has promised that the earth will be made fruitful for our benefit until such a time as He decides to draw down the curtain, human actions can’t possibly endanger the stability of the climate. Indeed, in addition to the section of Genesis quoted in the video and reproduced above, this promise is made explicit in chapter 9, versus 1-17: a covenant with Noah signed with a rainbow. More commonly I think religious perspectives are one among a range of drives that lead - in some people some of the time - to a general resistance. The expression of these specific, ring-fenced objections is - if not specifically religious – at least subject to the same modus operandi described in previous examples. Consider a seemingly reasonable objection known as ‘the pause’: the claim that there has been only insignificant warming since 1998. If the model of climate change that attributes modern warming trends to human activity is correct, an alleged lull in this effect is an intuitively appealing challenge to that thesis: until you ask which trends specifically, and based on which data? In the context of normal conversation ‘insignificant’ means something like ‘not very much’ or ‘not very important’. For a scientist, however, ‘significance’ has a specific meaning relating to the ability of a given statistical method to demonstrate an effect in a given data set: detecting deviation from chance in the context of the variability of that data. For the period in question changes in global surface air temperatures have been rather sluggish: see the reddish-brown bit of the first graph in this article. But is that the only trend worth considering? As the same article explains, warming has continued unabated if we consider the heat content of the oceans as well. As I said, ‘significance’ has a specific meaning in lieu of the variability of the data in question. Its worth considering were the variability in some trends might come from. One of the short-term wiggles imposed on longer-term trends in temperature relates to ocean cycles, and the fact that there have been a preponderance of surface-cooling La Niña events since 1999. Thus, if we consider all the relevant facts – especially recent developments  that give a clearer picture of warming even in terms of surface temperatures - 'the pause' loses some of its luster. We can also ask: what is special about the period in question, why look for a trend in  that stretch of times specifically? In the context of noisy data - where short-term variability is imposed upon longer-term trends - it’s always possible to chose precisely the period that gives the answer you want. But it’s up to you explain just why a period is relevant. The scientific consensus has specific arguments tying the modern temperature trend to the footprints of anthropogenic climate influence. Can the same be said of 'the pause'? Healthy skepticism is the lifeblood of science, but denialism in all its guises is evident every time you see the cherry-picking of data to serve a pre-conceived hypothesis.

The Escalator, by Skeptical Science

One might argue that the retreat to smaller and more specific gaps is merely the flip-side of the scientific method: a modification and adaption to new facts as they appear. But there is a difference.A good scientific theory is a knowingly provisional statement about the picture supplied by a combination of the known facts and known mechanisms. A new theory in the face of new facts is not the defeat of the previous theory, but a realization of the very point of the scientific method. In contrast, arguments that rely solely on cherished ‘gaps’, are claims about what is unknowable, or areas that will never be amenable to science. Thus, the change of a claim about an irreducible, unknowable gap is an admission of defeat: the thesis is actively disproven. The retreat to a smaller claim is forced upon proponents, not accommodated by them.

As I’ve tried to stress again and again in this post, I am not saying that current hypotheses about cosmology, evolution and climate change are an automatic givens that brook no dispute. Nor am I saying there is a necessary tension between these hypotheses and a spiritual vision of the world. Neither am I attributing this specific type of gap argument – which ultimately makes its home in and relies on ignorance – to all religious persons, or all religious arguments. One wonders about the extent to which these misunderstanding and misuses of scientific fact and method is due to the distance between the common language uses of certain terms, and their meanings in relation to science. For a scientist, a ‘law’ is a mere regularity: a regularly observed feature of certain data under certain conditions. A ‘theory’ is a model, a limited set of processes and relationships that try to provide a rationale and causal story for those regularities. A ‘hypothesis’ is a specific application of a theory to a given situation, that makes empirical claims about what should happen in that situation given the theory. The thesis I’ve tried to lay out is this:  If you admit that these are the tools for job, you have to admit all the fruits of their labour, not just the ones that serve your purpose.

See you all in 2014. And remember: if you like it, share it.

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Turtles All The Way Down: ways in which the abyss smiles back

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd go away.

 ― Hugh Mearns

The last post on the prime mover – the entity or thing that got the universal ball rolling - left me thinking. In it, I was concerned with the ways in which – leaving aside the validity of the argument itself -  it is sometimes misused to sneak in other preconceived notions about the attributes we think a Ultimate Cause should have. Here, I’d like to pick apart the issue of validity as a springboard for some musing on why that validity goes largely unquestioned. In essence, the argument takes something we think we know about ‘normal phenomena’ – effects have causes, ‘motion’  is imparted rather than self-generated, contingent events rely on necessary precursors – and makes the same claim of the whole shebang: the overarching System itself. Is this valid? What it it that makes us so sure that reality itself is constrained by the same apparent rules as the things it contains? 

The Big Bang is touted as the ‘scientific’ view of the origin of the universe, but it's important to note that the claim is quite specifically constrained within the system. The claim is that, in the words of Wikipedia (my emphasis, and minus citations):

Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This singularity signals the breakdown of general relativity. How closely we can extrapolate towards the singularity is debated—certainly no closer than the end of the Planck epoch.

That is - using the rules that are derived from the regularities of phenomena - we have an model of how to run the tape backward, but we can’t get back at time zero. The rules evident within don’t make it through the bottleneck at the start of things to explain the system’s very existence. I’m not knocking the theory – I’m barely equipped to understand the thinking behind it in anything other than crude terms – I just wanted to make clear at the outset that the following isn’t an attack on certain peoples’ ideas of ultimate origins, but an exploration why we feel the need have them in the first place. 

There's a story that has some great scientist, lecturing on modern ideas on cosmology, who is accosted by an old lady who insists the world is flat and carried about on the back of a giant turtle. The scientist, scoffing at this, demands to know: what is supporting the turtle? Quite clearly - the woman tells hims – it's turtles all the way down. Deliciously, the story itself appears to exist unsupported: there's a string of attributions for the source of the story or the identity of the scientist including – apparently inaccurately – Bertrand Russel and William James and individuals before them. What it brings out nicely is the way in which humanity, when faced with an abyss it can’t seem to fill, populates that void with things it can relate to. It’s as if, given the capacity to ask the great questions, we can’t bear the possibility that they’re unanswerable. I wonder how much of our certainty in our metaphysical systems – religious or otherwise – is compensation for our own awareness of the existential abyss we find when we delve for Complete explanations.    

  

“There was a young man who said "God

I find it exceedingly odd

To think that this tree

Should continue to be

When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by,

Yours faithfully, God.”

― Ronald A. Knox

This notion of god as the guarantor of reality and the wellspring of everything is certainly comforting, and perhaps that’s the best we can do: faced with a troubling, impenetrable lack we have to negate it with something big enough, but human enough for us to comprehend. Personally though, I can’t help but ask the next question: from whence does it come? This tension - between needing some active creative principle that is comprehensible enough to be accessible in its motivation, and the recognition that anything sufficiently up to the task of being the ground for that creation must be so beyond our ken so as to render it equally disquieting – is evident in both western and eastern traditions. Gnosticism distinguishes between God – the ground or totality of reality – and the ‘evil’ Demiurge who created the material universe, variously identified as both Satan and Yahweh among other contenders. Hindu writings, in the form of the Rig Veda, nicely encapsulate the dilemma: 

But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.

- Nasadiya Sukta, a.k.a. Hymn of Creation, The Rigveda (10:129).

Maybe it’s us – not nature – that abhors a vacuum.

PHOTO BY DAVID DREXLER

   

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