The Ghost in The Universe God in Light of Modern Science

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The Ghost in The UniverseGod in Light of Modern
Science

• Taner Edis
• Truman State University
• www2.truman.edu/edis

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Questions

• Is there a God? Is there any spiritual reality
  beyond nature?
• Is this a philosophical question? A matter of
  faith? What do our sciences have to say?
• Another book by a physicist with God in the
  title?

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Philosophy of religion

• Debate traditional proofs
• Gods nonexistence is inconceivable.
• The universe requires God as a cause.
• Complex order indicates a designer-God.
• Philosophical atheists point out
• God might not exist.
• The universe might be a brute fact.
• Complex order might arise naturally.

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Bring in science!

• Armchair debates about a generic metaphysical
  God. Disconnected from actual religions.
• Proofs fail, but our world might be best
  explained by a theory where a God has a central
  role.
• So does a God explain our world? What do our
  sciences have to say?

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Debunking God?

• So is God the ghost in the universe, treatable
  like any other ghost claim?
• Maybe religion is not testable about morality,
  meaning, metaphysical ultimates. Beyond science?

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A top-down world?
Person. A mind. Purpose.

• Religion is not just moral philosophy. Even
  liberal religions imagine reality
  anthropomorphically claiming spiritual realities
  beyond nature. Down deep, reality is
  supposed to be mind-like arranged top-down.

Material. Inert. Shapeless.
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Or bottom-up?

• A naturalistic view takes complexity, including
  life and mind, to be assembled out of the
  lifeless and mindless substrate of mere physics.

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What are we arguing about?

• Is a God metaphysically necessary?
• Can evolution account for creative novelty?
• Were the laws of physics designed?
• Does history include events of revelation?
• Paranormal miracles? A spirit realm?
• Is mystical experience beyond the brain?
• Why trust science in a postmodern world?
• Does our moral life require a God?

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What is the world like?

• The question of God involves all our sciences
  the best of all our knowledge.
• Not a debunking exercise, but not a matter for
  armchair debate either.

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Parapsychology

• Historically, anti-materialist research program.
  Seek not just anomalies, but spirit which acts
  upon matter.
• Liberal theologians sympathetic to psi. Go
  beyond narrow naturalism agent causation.

Spirit/ mind
Mere matter
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Evidence for psi?

• Schwartz mediums talk to dead!
  Critics cheating, bad methods.
• Psi claims dont stand out from complex
  but natural background.
• Coin flips guessing 80 stands out, not 51.
  Need not find precise flaw.
• Also NDEs etc. Like other weirdness in brain.
  No violation of natural background.

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Psi and the supernatural

• Psi not just experimental failure, but does not
  fit science in general. Especially neuroscience.
• Psi is increasingly implausible as we begin to
  understand mind in physical terms.
• Issue is natural and supernatural, bottom-up vs.
  top-down.

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Psi fails so?

• Skeptics of psi may be religious, and psi
  supporters may not accept a traditionally
  conceived God.
• But if no non-material spirit which acts on
  matter exists, if mind and intelligence is
  materially based, what then of gods? What of the
  top-down universe?

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Intelligent Design

• ID creationism without Bible-thumping. Appeals
  to broad theistic intuitions.
• Biology side issue. Concern is irreducibility of
  intelligence, of creativity. Information comes
  from above, in a top-down, hierarchical reality.

Generic God
complexity
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Information from above

• ID-like themes of information, top-down causality
  also surface among theological liberals.
• Example John Haught, 2000. God as the ultimate
  source of the novel informational patterns
  available to evolution.
• Polkinghorne, Peacocke,

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Whats wrong with ID?

• ID certainly not practiced as a science. For
  example no scientific ID publications.
• More important the questions ID raises about
  complexity are already answered.
• We know the Darwinian mechanism creates
  information.

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Darwin in mind

• Random variation and selection, and lack of
  preset goals critical for achieving genuine
  creative novelty.
• Darwinian mechanism increasingly important in AI,
  cognitive science.
• It is likely that our own creative intelligence
  depends on Darwinian processes in the brain.

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Darwin vs. God?

• Darwinian evolution is not just an alternative to
  intelligent design it encompasses
  intelligence.
• But the notion of top-down, divine creativity
  relies on analogy to our own intelligent designs.
  If that is reducible to chance and necessity,
  what then of the creator God?

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Liberal evasion

• What if a hidden God works through natural
  processes evolution is Gods way of creation?
• Evasive. Attaching a God to evolution is
  arbitrary at best.
• Psi, ID, etc. express deep intuitions about
  spiritual realities. Their failure is
  significant.

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Theistic cosmology

• But what about arguments from modern
  physics?
• Physical constants are fine-tuned for
  intelligent life.
• The big bang is creation!
• Quantum mechanics indicates consciousness is the
  fundamental reality.
• The elegant symmetries of physical laws point to
  a supreme intelligence.

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Physical cosmology

• Actual physics
• Physical constraints or multiple universes.
  Theistic explanation itself fine-tuned.
• Big bang begins space and time. Random uncaused.
  Or, no true boundary.
• Quantum mechanics does not require consciousness.
  Weird, not magical.
• Symmetric laws are frameworks for accidents
  like coin flipping.

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Is it all an accident?

• Common sense rebels against the notion that the
  universe is a mere accident. But for
  naturalists, at some level, it must be.
• Is calling something an accident just covering up
  an ignorance of real causes?

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Cause
Effect

• What of the randomness in modern physics?

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Playing dice with the world

• Fundamental physics is full of randomness
• Quantum mechanics e.g. particle-antiparticle
  pair creation in vacuum.
• Singularities of general relativity
  (black holes, big bang).
• Even everyday physics
• Heat due to disorder
  and randomness.

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The dice

• Elegant fundamental laws say very little about
  our world. That comes through low-energy laws,
  frozen accidents, randomly realized through
  symmetry breaking. The most basic laws only tell
  what sort of dice generated our history.
• Randomness is fundamental. This
  is no accident.

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Hidden causes?

• But is not randomness again just a label for
  ignorance?
• A God directs seeming accidents of evolution
  and history? God selects outcome of the Big
  Bang. A hidden, nonphysical cause.
• Causal determinism still attracts physicists.
  Bohmian QM.

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What is randomness?

• Mathematically, a random infinite sequence is one
  which lacks any pattern.

. . .
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H
T
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Alternating pattern of heads and tails
. . .
H
T
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Patternless, random sequence
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Where explanation ends

• Cant predict next coin in random sequence.
  Cant find a theory giving the pattern.
• Cant do our usual pattern recognition and find a
  place in a network of causes.
• Something is random if theres no pattern and no
  good prospect of finding one. When we have to
  say its a brute fact.
• All sequences are partly random.

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Randomness is basic!

• In fundamental theories of physics, we have
  randomness. The laws are random, simple, framing
  accidents. The dynamics are also random.
• Everyday
  cause and effect are not fundamental. They
  emerge from a microscopic substrate where things
  just happen randomly.

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An accidental world

• No legitimate way to infer a God from a universe
  which is fundamentally random. Completely
  arbitrary, uninformative.
• Our very minds are products of an accidental,
  material world, relying on randomness for
  creativity. Hopelessly bottom-up.

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Back to philosophy?

• Postmodernism Science has no privilege over
  other ways of knowing. Or, need to invoke a
  rational God to resolve the crisis of reason and
  guarantee that science works.
• Objective, prescriptive moral truths cannot be
  grounded in material nature. The
  authority of morality is rooted
  in a spiritual reality.

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Back to science!

• Science works, and this is best explained
  from within science. We need no
  uncriticizable presuppositions to ground
  our knowledge about the world.
• Our stable interests, and morality as a social
  enterprise, are best understood through our
  sciences. Good and evil is neither fully
  objective nor completely subjective.

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In short

• Our sciences, in a broad sense, are the best
  tools to bring to the debate over God.
• Religious theories have been massive failures
  liberal reinterpretations are merely evasive.
• We have an alternative view of the world
  Naturalistic, random in the end, which does a
  much better job explaining things.

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The book

• The Ghost in the Universe, by Taner Edis,
  published by Prometheus Books, 2002.
• Available in larger bookstores, amazon.com, etc.

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My web site

• www2.truman.edu/edis
• Contains all sorts of articles, including the
  slides of this talk, and the introductory chapter
  of The Ghost in the Universe.
• My e-mail is edis_at_truman.edu

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Thanks for listening!

• Any questions?

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