- Haisch, Bernard.
The Purpose-Guided Universe.
Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-60163-122-0.
-
The author, an astrophysicist who was an editor of the
Astrophysical Journal for a decade, subtitles
this book “Believing In Einstein, Darwin, and God”.
He argues that the militant atheists who have recently argued
that science is incompatible with belief in a Creator
are mistaken and that, to the contrary, recent scientific results
are not only compatible with, but evidence for, the intelligent
design of the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the
universe.
Central to his argument are the variety of “fine tunings”
of the physical constants of nature. He lists ten of these in the
book's summary, but these are chosen from a longer list. These are
quantities, such as the relative masses of the neutron and proton,
the ratio of the strength of the electromagnetic and gravitational
forces, and the curvature of spacetime immediately after the Big
Bang which, if they differed only slightly from their actual
values, would have resulted in a universe in which the complexity
required to evolve any imaginable form of life would not exist.
But, self evidently, we're here, so we have a mystery to explain.
There are really only three possibilities:
- The values of the fine-tuned parameters are those
we measure because they can't be anything else. One
day we'll discover a master equation which allows us to
predict their values from first principles, and we'll
discover that any change to that equation produces
inconsistent results. The universe is fine tuned
because that's the only way it could be.
- The various parameters were deliberately fine tuned by
an intelligent, conscious designer bent on creating a
universe in which sufficient complexity could evolve so
as to populate it with autonomous, conscious beings.
The universe is fine tuned by a creator because
that's necessary to achieve the goal of its creation.
- The parameters are random, and vary from universe to
universe among an ensemble in a “multiverse”
encompassing a huge, and possibly infinite number of
universes with no causal connection to one another. We
necessarily find the parameters of the universe we inhabit
to be fine tuned to permit ourselves to exist because if
they weren't, we wouldn't be here to make the observations
and puzzle over the results. The universe is fine tuned
because it's just one of a multitude with different settings,
and we can only observe one which happens to be tuned for us.
For most of the history of science, it was assumed that possibility
(1)—inevitability by physical necessity—was what we'd
ultimately discover once we'd teased out the fundamental laws at the
deepest level of nature. Unfortunately, despite vast investment in
physics, both experimental and theoretical, astronomy, and cosmology,
which has matured in the last two decades from wooly speculation to a
precision science, we have made essentially zero progress toward this
goal. String theory, which many believed in the heady days of the mid-1980s
to be the path to that set of equations you could wear on a T-shirt and
which would crank out all the dial settings of our universe, now
seems to indicate to some (but not all) of those pursuing
it, that possibility (3): a vast “landscape” of universes,
all unobservable even in principle, one of which with wildly improbable
properties we find ourselves in because we couldn't exist in most of the
others is the best explanation.
Maybe, the author argues, we should take another look at possibility
(2). Orthodox secular scientists are aghast at the idea, arguing that
to do so is to “abandon science” and reject rational
inference from experimental results in favour of revelation based
only on faith. Well, let's compare alternatives (2) and (3) in that
respect. Number three asks us to believe in a vast or infinite number
of universes, all existing in their own disconnected bubbles of spacetime
and unable to communicate with one another, which cannot be
detected by any imaginable experiment, without any evidence for the
method by which they were created nor idea how it all got started. And
all of this to explain the laws and initial conditions of the single
universe we inhabit. How's that for taking things on faith?
The author's concept of God in this volume is not that of the
personal God of the Abrahamic religions, but rather something
akin to the universal God of some Eastern religions, as summed
up in Aldous Huxley's
The Perennial Philosophy.
This God is a consciousness encompassing the entire universe
which causes the creation of its contents, deliberately setting
things up to maximise the creation of complexity, with the eventual
goal of creating more and more consciousness through which the
Creator can experience the universe. This is actually not unlike
the scenario sketched in Scott Adams's
God's Debris, which people might
take with the seriousness it deserves had it been written by somebody
other than the creator of Dilbert.
If you're a regular reader of this chronicle, you'll know that my
own personal view is in almost 100% agreement with Dr. Haisch on
the big picture, but entirely different on the nature of the Creator.
I'll spare you the detailed exposition, as you can read it in
my comments on Sean Carroll's
From Eternity to Here (February 2010).
In short, I think it's more probable than not we're living in a
simulation, perhaps created by a thirteen year old
post-singularity superkid as a science fair project. Unlike an
all-pervading but imperceptible
Brahman or an
infinitude of unobservable universes in an inaccessible multiverse,
the simulation hypothesis makes predictions which render it
falsifiable, and hence a scientific theory. Eventually, precision measurements
will discover, then quantify, discrepancies due to round-off errors in the
simulation (for example, an integration step which is too large),
and—what do you know—we already have in hand a
collection
of nagging little discrepancies which look doggone suspicious to me.
This is not one of those mushy “science and religion can coexist”
books. It is an exploration, by a serious scientist who has thought deeply
about these matters, of why evidence derived entirely from science is pointing
those with minds sufficiently open to entertain the idea, that the possibility
of our universe having been deliberately created by a conscious intelligence
who endowed it with the properties that permit it to produce its own expanding
consciousness is no more absurd that the hypotheses favoured by those who reject
that explanation, and is entirely compatible with recent experimental results, which
are difficult in the extreme to explain in any other manner. Once the universe is
created (or, as I'd put it, the simulation is started), there's no reason for the
Creator to intervene: if all the dials and knobs are set correctly, the laws
discovered by Einstein, Darwin, Maxwell, and others will take care of the rest.
Hence there's no conflict between science and evidence-based belief in
a God which is the first cause for all which has happened since.
October 2010 