The opinion researchers Ipsos-Mori have just completed an Opinion Poll on behalf of the British Council, of a sample of 11,768 people aged 18+, in 10 different countries – Argentina, China, Egypt, Spain, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the UK and the USA.
The poll asked the surveyed adults to say whether they had heard of Charles Darwin and knew of his work on evolution, and asked their opinion about whether (a) Darwin’s theory of evolution should be taught in schools on its own; or (b) in conjunction with creationism and/or ‘intelligent design’. Only 7000 members of the sample had actually heard of
Of the British adults surveyed (973 members, 8.268% of sample), 54% said they wanted evolution taught alongside creationism and intelligent design. In the
This figure rose to 68% in
I have had my own run-in with creationists. In fact, I was told by one recently that, if I did not believe that the world was created in six days (meaning, in six periods of twenty-four hours – I checked that that was what he meant) 6000 years ago, then I was destined to spend eternity in the flames of Hell, for not believing the Word of God.
I told the man who said this (a civil engineer by profession, a Dr Farid Abou-Rahme, see: http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/index.php/Main/FaridAbouRahme) that, if so, I was in good company, and preferred the idea of going to Hell with Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking than to Paradise with him. I also told him precisely where he could stick his Bible.
Divine intervention is not a requirement for evolutionary speciation by means of natural selection of random mutations. Divine
Does the existence of the Universe require God for an explanation? If there is only one Universe, and only one set of physical laws and parameters and was only one set of initial conditions, then yes, because the weak anthropic principle is not a sufficient explanation of the fact that they are so finely adjusted to the requirements of organic chemistry and biology, and the strong anthropic principle is, in Barrow and Tipler’s reformulation, merely a re-statement of the classic Design Argument of St Thomas Aquinas and William Paley (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_argument).
However, if, on the other hand, there is a cosmological Multiverse – not like Linde’s and Vanchurin’s – but with an infinite number of universes, all existing in parallel, in an infinitely extended higher dimension, with each having its own, quantum multiverse – then the answer may be no.
If the laws and parameters of physics are different on each separate ‘brane’ – i.e., in each separate universe, the question is, do they need to be the same at the ‘Big Bang’ stage – when the four forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear interactions; were one, unified force?
If the answer to that is ‘yes’, then there is no escape from theism – God is still there, and He has not become a deus otiosus or a deus absconditus. If you can explain away the fine-tuning of our particular universe for carbon-based life, and for observers, in terms of the weak anthropic principle and observer self-selection effects, then how do you explain away the physics that allows those self-selection effects to arise in the first place?
Even if the laws of the ultra-high energy, ultra-high temperature and pressure physics that prevailed in the very early Universe were extremely general, you would still have to explain how they got there, and where they came from. Where did the mass and energy come from? Who or what ‘decided’ on the physical parameters and initial conditions?
This, of course, assumes that we are dealing with one – and only one – Big Bang. Now let’s assume that each separate universe, or ‘brane’, of the Multiverse had its own Big Bang, and therefore has its own laws of physics at ultra-high, as well as much lower, temperatures. Consequently, there are an infinite number of different sets of laws of physics, physical constants, and initial conditions. That still leaves the question of where did the mass and energy come from.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows a quantum system to ‘borrow’ energy for a given amount of time and then pay it back, by the equation:
ħ = ∆E.∆t .
Thus, the electromagnetic interaction between two charged particles is mediated by the exchange between them of a ‘virtual’ photon, which ‘borrows’ energy equal to hν (Planck’s constant × its frequency) for a time t = 1/2πν.
For a universe, the amount of time that the energy needs to be borrowed for is enormous, and one would think that the amount of energy required would be enormous, too – but in fact, it can sum to something close to zero.
This is because gravitational energy, which is trying to pull all the matter and energy in the universe back into a singularity (a Euclidean point, of zero extension and dimension) can be treated as negative, and subtracted from the kinetic energy of the Big Bang itself, which is, of course, pushing everything in the universe further apart, and the energy of the cosmological constant repulsion force, which is doing the same thing. There is also heat energy in the universe, which diminishes as the cosmos cools down.
This idea still pre-supposes, however, that there is something for the universe (whichever universe it happens to be) to borrow energy from. The ‘quantum vacuum’ has to pre-exist from all eternity, and it is the quantum vacuum that proclaims Fiat lux.
It won’t do, will it? Try as hard as I can, I cannot come up with a convincing argument – one that convinces me, at any rate – that atheism is true. You can squeeze Him out of biology, but you cannot squeeze Him out of cosmology. I don’t believe in the cosmological Multiverse, on the grounds, quite simply, of Occam’s Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicandur quærens necessitatem[1].
As far as the quantum multiverse is concerned, it seems to me that the Copenhagen Interpretation is more likely to be valid than the
Kierkegaard said that ‘subjectivity is the truth’. I disagree, but not to the extent of flatly contradicting him. I prefer, rather, to say, ‘intersubjectivity is the truth.’ Nor do I agree with the likes of Richard Rorty or Hilary Putnam that ‘there is no such thing as “truth”’.
God is still needed for the Creatio ex nihilo; He (I use the masculine pronoun purely for convenience – I do not imply that God is, in fact, male – or female, for that matter, and certainly not neuter) had to pre-exist from all eternity in order to create the matter and energy of the Universe, and establish the laws and constants of physics and initial conditions required for carbon-based life and, eventually, observers to emerge at the appropriate times.
This is, of course, the Barrow-Tipler Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP), or revived/revised Design (or Teleological) Argument.
The appropriate time, in the case of Observers, is given by:
t = 2GM/c3 = 2ħ2/Gmpmnmec = (3.3825 × 1038) × (ħ/mec2 = 1.288 × 10-21 s)
= 4.35666 × 1017 s = 13.8 billion years .
Here, the expression ħ/mec2 represents the angular
As can easily be seen, this is the present age of the Universe, as determined by the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP).
Anatomically modern humans, the sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens, first emerged in
Perhaps that means that we have at long last come of age – or maybe just entered adolescence.
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1 comment:
... probably not suitable as a comment, but your quotation of Occam's Razor doesn't seem quite right. I think it should be "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem". Maybe a confusion with the other tag:"fides quaerens intellectum"?
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