Theodicy.

‘That I may assert Eternal Providence/And justifie the ways of God to men.’ So Milton declares his aim in writing Paradise Lost (Bk.1, ll.25-6).

Theodicy is a compound of two Greek words – theos, God, and dikē, justice. The ‘theodicy question’ is the attempt to answer the question that is often put by people who have become atheists because of something terrible that has happened, either to them, or to someone they loved. ‘If God is good and all-powerful, why does He allow so much suffering and so many terrible things to happen in the world?’

This question is very often couched in directly personal terms. ‘If God is so good, why did He let my wife/husband/son/daughter die of cancer?’

The people concerned don’t usually have any problem with the idea of God’s omnipotence. It is automatically assumed that, if God exists, then He is all-powerful. What they question is His moral status – His goodness. And given that God is supposed to be good per definitionem, they regard the absence of goodness they perceive as conclusive disproof of His existence.

What all such people fail to understand, however, is that God is not in the business of ensuring that everyone’s life runs absolutely smoothly and pain-free. Nor Has He organised the Universe to ensure that no-one ever dies, or gets sick, or injured in an accident, or as a result of some natural event, like an earthquake, or a flood.

To create a complete pain, suffering and death-free world for us to live in would require so much intervention in the natural order on His part, that the natural order would, in effect, disappear, and the divine, supernatural order be visible to plain sight. There would, in consequence, be no room for faith.

With no room for faith, there would be room for free will; and without free will, there can be no love, because love, in order to be genuine love, must be given freely, and from the heart.

Above all, God wants us to freely love Him, because He is love (1 John 4:8). So free will is not an optional extra: it is essential. Without free will, we would, in any event, be like zombies or robots, with no more moral responsibility for our actions than a computer has for its actions.

The 18^th Century French philosopher, François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), ridiculed Leibnitz’s idea that ‘all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ in his famous satire, Candide, and it is understandable, in many ways, why he and others should have felt compelled to do so – just as it is understandable why the Jews of Auschwitz should have felt justified in putting their God on trial (if the story described by Elie Wiesel in The Trial of God has any truth in it, that is; sc., the excellent BBC2 TV play by Frank Cottrell Boyce, based on the book, broadcast in September 2008, God on Trial, starring Anthony Sher, Stephen Dillane, Rupert Graves and Jack Shepherd).

Many of the terrible things that happen in this world are not the fault of God, but of Man. All too often, we exercise our free will to inflict death, injury and needless harm on our fellow human beings – physically, psychologically and in other ways, simply to gratify our own ends.

Many more ills, that are not the result of malign human acts, are the result of human omissions, neglect and negligence, or just sheer human stupidity. ‘Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain’ (Friedrich von Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III, vi).

So, whereas it might be understandable – and even pardonable – for Voltaire and the Auschwitz Jews to criticise Leibnitz’s theology and God Himself, respectively (particularly the latter, given their truly terrible circumstances), neither criticism is justified.

For, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, all really is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds – which may not say very much for the alternative possibilities, but we have already seen, in earlier postings, that the Universe is fine-tuned for life generally, and intelligent life here on Earth in particular.

This would suggest that the other alternatives might not even support life! In wishing the world to be other than it is, we would do well to be careful what we wish for – not that our loving Father would grant any of His children anything that would harm them.

He does however, permit them to harm themselves – precisely because He wants them to be free, and has endowed them with free will. So, if they end up killing themselves with a drugs overdose, or by driving their car while drunk, or by committing suicide, then – although that will undoubtedly grieve Him – He will allow it, because free will matters, and He will not abrogate it just for our convenience.

There is, in other words, no divine equivalent of the ‘Nanny State’. We remain in control of ourselves, and therefore responsible for what we do, both to ourselves and to those around us; and we are responsible for ourselves, too.

Perhaps it is time we shifted the focus away from theodicy onto anthropodicy (Greek: anthrōpos, ‘man’; dikē, ‘justice’). That sound to me like a far more interesting question!

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Creationism versus Darwinism.

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 Darwin in the first place! (See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8322781.stm.)

Of the British adults surveyed (973 members, 8.268% of sample), 54% said they wanted evolution taught alongside creationism and intelligent design. In the US, of the 991 people who took part in the survey (8.421% of sample), some 51% agreed that evolution should be taught alongside creationism and intelligent design.

This figure rose to 68% in Argentina. Worldwide, 43% said evolution should be taught alongside other views, while 20% said only evolution should be taught (see: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5jNch2zlhAbeuVngLrvT2C0szGfOQ.)

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 Providence cannot be ruled out of Earth’s biological history – the Chicxulub asteroid impact 65 million years ago that wiped the dinosaurs out, and allowed the mammals to take their place, may have been no more than a happy accident, from our point of view – but on the other hand, it may have been the hand of God at work. However, if it cannot be ruled out, neither can it be ruled in. Whether or not you believe in a God – that is a matter of choice – of individual faith.

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 Everett de-Witt Interpretation, and I prefer its emphasis on the rôle of the Observer, in any event. The quantum multiverse also seems to me to be ruled out by Occam’s Razor, and by the principle – central to quantum mechanics – that unobservables, or things that are not even indirectly observable, are of no significance for physics (or empirical science, generally).

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/Gm_pm_nm_ec = (3.3825 × 10³⁸) × (ħ/m_ec² = 1.288 × 10^-21 s)

= 4.35666 × 10¹⁷ s = 13.8 billion years .

Here, the expression ħ/m_ec² represents the angular Compton period of the electron. M is the Mass of the observable Universe (8.79674 × 10⁵² kg). The 3.3825 × 10³⁸ is close to Dirac’s large number (actually ħc/Gm_p² = 1.69358 × 10³⁸), which is the reciprocal of the gravitational coupling constant, 5.90465 × 10^-39.

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 Africa some 500,000 years ago (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human). This is 0.003623% of the total age of the Universe. We have had the scientific knowledge and technological capability to launch space probes only in the last fifty-two years, since the launch of Sputnik 1, on 4^th October 1957. That is 0.0000003768% of the age of the Universe. A space probe as sophisticated as WMAP could only be launched within the last ten years – in fact, on 30^th June, 2001, nearly 8 years 4 months ago. Eight years is 0.00000005797% of the age of the Universe, so it was just 0.00000005797% of the age of the Universe ago that we became capable of measuring the age of the Universe.

Perhaps that means that we have at long last come of age – or maybe just entered adolescence.

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^[1] ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.’

Middle Eastern Apocalypse, 2009?

Today’s (Sunday, 25^th October) BBC News Online carries a story about Israeli police arresting stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators outside the Al-Alqsa Mosque on Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

So, what else is new, you might ask. What is new, and disturbing, is that the demonstration was provoked by rumours that have been circulating in the Arab communities throughout the Middle East that Jewish extremists are plotting to destroy the Dome of the Rock (the Masjid Qubbat as-Sahkrah, or Kipat Hasela^[1], in Hebrew, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dome_of_the_Rock) and/or the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself, together known as Al-Haram al-Sharif, ‘The Noble Sanctuary’, in order to make space to rebuild the Temple, and re-instute the Temple sacrifices, which were halted when the Romans under Titus destroyed the Second Temple in 70 AD, following the First Jewish Revolt of 66-70. (See the account of Flavius Josephus [37-c.100 AD], The Jewish Wars, VI, 249-60, trans. & ed., William Whiston,

http://old.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0148;query=whiston%20chapter%3D%2394;layout=;loc=6.177.)

That these rumours are being stoked up by enemies of peace on the Arab side is certain. That they are not without foundation is, unfortunately, also certain. For there are indeed Jewish extremists who have been wanting to do precisely as outlined above ever since the Israelis seized East Jerusalem from Jordanian control in the Six Day War in 1967. It was only the intervention of the then Israeli Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, that prevented members of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) from dynamiting the Dome of the Rock then. (See: http://www.acpr.org.il/English-Nativ/06-issue/medad-6.htm.)

These extremists are supported by so-called ‘Christian Zionists’, such as David ben-Ariel, and Dispensationalist Evangelicals, such as Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, all three of whom may safely be characterised as American Christian fundamentalists, well to the right of the political spectrum.

‘Google’ the term ‘Third Temple’, and this is what you will come up with: David ben-Ariel’s ’Blog (see link above); the website of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement, http://www.templemountfaithful.org/ (‘Our goal is the building of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in our lifetime in accordance with the Word of G-d and all the Hebrew prophets and the liberation of the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation so that it may be consecrated to the Name of G-d^[2]); and http://thirdtemple.org/, a vitriolic anti-Muslim site featuring the Dutch politician Geert Wilder’s film, Fitna, which portrays the Qu’ran as a ‘fascist’ book, and all Muslims as extremists, and a piece by a Spanish journalist which reads, in part, ‘we [Europeans] killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. … under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of… racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride’.

The Muslims I know are neither stupid nor ignorant, they are extremely hard working, have never been in trouble with the law, and no-one could further from the description of intolerant religious extremist. On the contrary, they are as moderate as the average middle-of-the-road Anglican.

Just who is the intolerant religious extremist here? Is it someone who can work in a shop or restaurant and happily serve their customers alcohol, even though they can’t drink alcohol themselves, or is it someone who rants about all Muslims as if every single Muslim man, woman and child in Europe was a stupid, ignorant, intolerant, religiously extremist layabout and social security scrounger-cum-criminal?

This is not true of the vast majority of European Muslims, of whom it was estimated in 2006 there are 13 million, not 20 million (see: http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/Manifestations_EN.pdf). On the contrary, they are more likely to be the victims of crime and ethnic and religious discrimination, as the recent BBC Panorama undercover investigation on a housing estate, Broadmead, on the outskirts of Bristol, showed (see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nfr2h/Panorama_Undercover_Hate_on_the_Doorstep/).

At a time when the Israeli Government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is refusing to halt its settlement building in the Occupied Territories, or even to consider dismantling its controversial Security Fence (or ‘Peace Barrier’, as they prefer to call it), and at a time when the Palestinian National Authority of Mahmoud Abbas is only in control of parts of the West Bank, with Gaza being controlled by the rejectionist group Hamas, any talk of a new intifada, or Palestinian uprising, sparked by rumours of threats to the Haram al-Sharif, is – to say the least – inflammatory.

That said, what the Israeli authorities should be doing is making it abundantly clear to their own extremist factions that talk of destroying the Dome of the Rock, and building a Third Temple in its place, must remain talk, and that any moves to act upon it will not be tolerated.

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^[1] Alternatively, Hashtiyah, the word referring to the ‘Foundation Stone’ (Arabic: Sahkrah or Tzachra, depending on transliteration used.) This is the site of Abraham’s offer of sacrifice of his son, Isaac (Gen.22:1-14), or, in Muslim tradition, Ishmael (Qu’ran: Sura 37:101-110).

^[2] Devout Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews may not pronounce the Sacred Name of their God, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH, or Yahweh), and will not even use the word ‘God’; hence, ‘G-d’.