Author Sees God in Physics

well, here we go again...

Is there anything more arrogant or self Indulgent as a man or woman trying to prove the existence of God? I mean, setting aside the whole point of faith and how a proof completely undermines it, how could anyone claim to "prove" God when we can't even explain why the universe is accelerating (dark energy might as well be called "God" for all we know about it), or where all the antimatter is, or how do define consciousness, or even how an insect can fly the way it does (we have an idea, but we can't say exactly why).

There is nothing wrong with religion and faith, regardless of the faith, be it atheism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any of the countless other belief systems. Just as there is nothing wrong with science, be it biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, etc. It's just that the two are separate sets of philosophies that don't mix well without a lot of hand waving and misdirection. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying a scientist can't be a religious as well, I'm just saying that it is self deception to believe we can apply the principles of one to prove the other.

You're right to point out that atheism is a faith. And you can have blind faith in science and/or scientists.

But science isn't a philosophy; it's a disciplined method of testing facts. It's not technology, which is an evolving (and occasionally lost) body of tools and such.

Your other points are very well taken. Descartes notwithstanding, you can't "prove" the existance of anything, let alone God.

You can't really even "prove" Descartes "cogito ergo sum;" since who's to say you're not just somebody else's dream alter ego?

I disagree with you regarding science as a philosophy. In my opinion, the sciences are a special type of philosophy, a self-consistent philosophy. After all, the belief that "facts" exist must itself be taken on faith.

Scientists have a deep faith that the universe follows logical, self-consistent laws that can be described by mathematics, but that is not by any means a certainty (though as one of the faithful, I believe it). Just because part of the Universe seems to follow certain rules doesn't mean all of it will, or that it always has or always will. Faith is required.

As for Descartes, the whole point of his philosophy was to prove the existence of a God (unfortunately). Roughly speaking, Descartes basically argues (and I'm clearly paraphrasing)that We can be certain in this world of nothing but our own consciousness, since this consciousness exists something must have created it, therefore there is a God. Of course, it took him thousands of pages to say that, mostly spending the time convincing us that we can't be certain of anything, which is why people often miss his point.

I agree that Descartes was wrong to believe that you can be certain of you're own consciousness, which was the lynch pin of his proof for the existence of God. After all, when you start to evaluate your own (my own) self awareness, you find you aren't perhaps as aware of yourself as you like to believe. In my case, the whole first half of my existence seems to be relegated to a handful of memories with giant gaps in between. Even if you asked me to describe what I did, felt, thought, last Tuesday in detail, I'd have trouble relating more than a few anecdotes. Much of Tuesday is lost to me, a mere 4 days later.

I'm afraid when it comes to self awareness, we have very little awareness of our selves outside of the moment. In the end we may find that self awareness is little more than an urge, like hunger, or thirst. I hope not, but the point is we can't know for certain and therefore Descartes can't use it as a certainty to prove the existence of God.

I better stop before I turn into a micro-Nietzsche.

Yeah; be careful. Nietzche's nihilism drove him mad.

I won't deny that you're a deep thinker. I'll rephrase my opinion about science.

I agree that belief that science works or that facts exist is a faith. I agree that people have faith in science and in scientists. But I believe that science itself is a mental tool; a precise, articulable and repeatable method or technique.

It's like hammers. It takes faith to think that hammers work, are necessary, or even exist. But once past that, they're simply tools.

I disagree. I would say the scientific method is a tool, but science itself is a philosophy. Much like meditation is a tool, but Buddhism is a philosophy, or prayer is a tool and Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc. are philosophies.

Of course there is a misconception out there that all philosophies are equally suited for all tasks. That's just sophistry. Philosophies by nature tend to be specialized. Science is great at evolving technology, but not very good at providing moral guidance. Religion offers morality and hope, but is not good at initiating change.

The problems occur when a philosophy believes it has the right to an equal weight opinion even in matters it's inherently not good at. Like a scientist trying to prove or disprove god, or the ridiculous pseudoscience of intelligent design.

It seems to me that our only disagreement is in definition of terms. And on that I won't argue. I think we're on the same side.

I bet we'd also agree that at the moment you die, it's far better to believe in God and be wrong, than to believe there is no God and be ...wrong.

I don't know about sides, but this was a refreshing discussion. Do you have a favorite philosopher? I'm just curious. I like Hegel, and though I know it's a bit cliche I can't help but love the clarity of Sun Tzu. There is much I haven't read though, and I've only really read mostly brand names at this point. Any suggestions you might have would be appreciated. As to your other point....

Who am I to argue with Pascal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager

Philosophers are, I think, too rooted to their time to make a relevant modern analysis of worth. Hegelian dialectic has been invoked in horrific ways Hegel would never have sanctioned (e.g., the Big Lie). To me it's kind of like asking who was the best engineer. Most modern engineers may be half as bright as Da Vinci was, but I wouldn't buy a ticket to any Da Vinci airplane...

I've quoted Sun Tzu more in the past few years than any philosopher that I can think of.

I sure like the Socratic method. I admire Cato, though he was more statesman than philosopher.

Casting the net a little bit further, I'm going to say Ludwig von Mises is my favorite ...um ...whatever. He was an economist, surely. But he was no less a philosopher. And judging where the world has gone, what he predicted, and how he validated the genius of our founding fathers (some of whom would qualify as philosophers in my book [I greatly admire George Mason and Patrick Henry]), he may go down in history as one of the greats (after all the living Democrats and Republicans are dead, of course).

I have socialist leanings, so it seems like Ludwig von Mises might be a good author to check out, since:

Mises developed the article into his book Socialism(1922), a comprehensive philosophical and sociological, as well as economic critique which still stands as the most thorough and devastating demolition of socialism ever written. Mises's Socialism converted many prominent economists and social philosophers out of socialism, including Hayek, the German Wilhelm Ropke, and the Englishman Lionel Robbins.

After all, I have to test my belief in socialism occasionally. I'll either come out of it converted or a little better equipped to debate the issue.

See you around CR4,

Roger

Wow. That's an exceptionally open minded attitude!

I was converted from socialism not by von Mises, but by meeting the people we entrust with socialist power...

An important premise in Pascal's Wager is that God cares whether you believe in him or not. It is not a God I wish to hold on high who would be so vain as to require my belief in him as a condition of entry into heaven, regardless of my pure heart and good works done during my life.

Speaking of premises, here are some from your statement:

An important premise in Pascal's Wager is that God cares whether you believe in him or not. It is not a God I wish to hold on high who would be so vain as to require my belief in him as a condition of entry into heaven, regardless of my pure heart and good works done during my life.

First, you call God a him.

Next, you dictate what the terms a God should require for entry to heaven. Are you qualified? I know I'm not.

Lastly, you talk of your pure heart and the good works you have done. Who's doing the judging here? You? Don't you think judging ones own "pure heart" may be a slight conflict of interest? At least Pascal wasn't so presumptuous.

I had no premise other than to point out that Pascal's Wager is intimately tied to his (Pascal's) presupposition that god is the God of the Judeo-catholic faith. Maybe that's the premise this entire thread is based on. But other options exist, don't they?

First, you call God a him.

Point taken. I don't think Pascal would have caught that one. But my point is that perhaps other gods don't require belief in them, the god, to enter "heaven" (a.k.a. everlasting bliss). My premise here is that perhaps there is a god of creation, that cares not if humans know of this god's existence. This other god may have other criteria for letting us into heaven. But, for a Judeo-Christian God one would assume living a Christian life would count for something.

Next, you dictate what the terms a God should require for entry to heaven. Are you qualified? I know I'm not.

It is not I who dictate this, but Pascal by the terms of his Wager. Pascal's Wager is that is it is better to believe in god in case god exists, so that one may enter heaven. What basis does Pascal have for assuming one's belief in god will influence god's decision? It is entirely possible that one's belief in god is irrelevant to entry into heaven. Examples of the pious who cause murder and mayhem abound. Again, one would hope that a just god would choose the good non-believer over the believing murderer.

Lastly, you talk of your pure heart and the good works you have done. Who's doing the judging here? You? Don't you think judging ones own "pure heart" may be a slight conflict of interest? At least Pascal wasn't so presumptuous.

My point, again, is that other factors may be important to god beyond one's belief, maybe event to the exclusion of belief. I certainly don't know what god's wish for us might be. Heck, I'm an atheist! I do, however, try to live by the golden rule. But then, Pascal's god is a jealous god (see Exodus 20:2-14, Deuteronomy 5:6-18) so maybe belief alone is all that matters!

Hi Roger, et. al.

I can't help but to throw in a post made by europium in thread "What is energy". His post (#179) really caused me to stop and take a closer look at things. Granted, the post doesn't directly address "God in Physics" but it really seems to apply directly to the direction that this thread is headed, don't you think?

-John

So do you consult the branches before you prune them? Do you poll the termites before you evaluate what they're doing to your home? Do pets come through your door uninvited?

Oh, and can we suppose that you've made friends of all you meet, and have given them keys to your home?

While we're not talking science here, we are talking logic. It's not just unfair that you'd apply a set of standards and values to God that you'd never apply to yourself.

One of the typical ways of thinking about the "proof" of God's existance is the order, patterns and interconnections that make every part of the universe look like a single piece of work.

This is not so different from the way scientists judge facts using the scientific method, key discoveries like the Doppler Effect.

It's pretty far in the opposite direction, it seems to me, to reject God on the basis you've expressed. There are many more logically consistent reasons to reject Him, if you're OK with the possible consequences of a boo boo.

Hey - don't sweat it - God doesn't mind if you don't want to "hold" Him "on high". He is used to people who are "so vain as to" require Him to be this way or that in order to earn their respect... Romans 9:21

It is nice to hear an avowed "Scientist" or should I say "Believer in Science" admit that believing in the laws of the universe following some self developed system of "logic" and mathematics (as we understand it) requires an excercise of faith.

As one who believes in the Christian bible and the God who (I believe) wrote it, I am often amused by the arrogance of the ignorant who think that they KNOW the nature and laws of the universe becasue they studied science at school where I adhere to a foolishness caused by inadequacy.

We all have a set of beliefs that can be called OUR faith. I don't think it is necesary to venture into existentialism to establish the acts of faith required to "believe" in science, we have only to aknowledge that we individually are unable to sufficiently test all the "facts" that we have assimilated into our world model - a scientist must have a great deal of faith in the scientific community who have gone before him - a faith that time and time again has been proven to be a very shaky foundation... Aristotle, Thomson, Rutherford, Bohr... Ptolemy, Copernicus, etc etc...

Engineers, on the other hand, are less faithful and seem to understand that they understand little -I admit some scientists may also fit this category - and say rather that the world behaves "as if" rather than "because".

Um...Amen?

I agree with you.

However, I know of many scientists who are believers in what most of us think of as a religion. They may not be as rare as you think.

They may not be as rare as you think.

We are not .

Hi Andy,

"But science isn't a philosophy; it's a disciplined method of testing facts"

So would you call the people who proposed the inflationary big bang theory scientists? Are there are any facts here that can be tested?

S

Very good point. There's a lot of "science" that ain't science.

Even if you can see evolution/devolution/change happen today, that doesn't mean it happened yesterday; and our ability to deduce yesterday has so far not been science. For that matter, just because Doppler shift works predictably here on earth doesn't mean that it works the same everywhere.

Scientists take leaps of faith very frequently. It's a sort of reverse ad hominem argument in that their ability to do science somehow grants their non-science derived utterances scientific truth.

Hey, we're all human. It'd be nice if we could agree on that.

Is there anything more arrogant or self Indulgent as a man or woman trying to prove the existence of God?

Yes. Someone justifying their own actions by saying that God wants (or tells) them to kill . Why must a small minority ruin it for the rest of us.

Hooray, we finally figured out how a bumblebee flies recently (took us a while thou ).

There are several links to the full article...and all of them are broken!

What's up?

Who could possibly have the power to completely erase...um...nevermind.

The links are broken on the Discovery Channel site.

Roger Pink, Prof. Tipler has been an atheist since the age of 16, yet only circa 1998 did he again become a theist due to advancements in the Omega Point Theory which occured after the publication of his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality (and Tipler even mentions in said book [pg. 305] that he is still an atheist because he didn't at the time have confirmation for the Omega Point Theory). Yet Tipler's first paper on the Omega Point Theory was in 1986 (Frank J. Tipler, "Cosmological Limits on Computation," International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 25, No. 6 [June 1986], pp. 617-661). What motivated Tipler's investigation as to how long life could go on was not religion (indeed, Tipler didn't even set out to find God), but Prof. Freeman J. Dyson's paper "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe" (Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, Issue 3 [July 1979], pp. 447-460 http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt ). Further, in a section entitled "Why I Am Not a Christian" in The Physics of Immortality (pg. 310), Tipler wrote, "However, I emphasize again that I do not think Jesus really rose from the dead. I think his body rotted in some grave." This book was written before Tipler realized what the resurrection mechanism is that Jesus could have used without violating any known laws of physics (and without existing on an emulated level of implementation--in that case the resurrection mechanism would be trivially easy to perform for the society running the emulation). The known laws of physics (i.e., general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Extended Standard Model of particle physics) force us to the conclusion that computational resources in the universe must diverge to infinity (i.e., in order for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent at all times). The final state of infinite informational capacity (which is never reached in experiential time) is identified as being God. For much more on the technical details of the above, see the below resources: F. J. Tipler, "The structure of the world from pure numbers," Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf Also released as "Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything," arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3276 "Omega Point (Tipler)," Wikipedia, January 6, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Omega_Point_%28Tipler%29&oldid=182549075 "Frank J. Tipler," Wikipedia, January 5, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_J._Tipler&oldid=182407923 Theophysics http://geocities.com/theophysics/ The only way to avoid the Omega Point cosmology is to invent tenuous physical theories which have no experimental support and which violate the known laws of physics, such as with Prof. Stephen Hawking's paper on the black hole information issue which is dependant on the conjectured string theory-based AdS/CFT correspondence (anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence). (See S. W. Hawking, "Information loss in black holes," Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8, 084013 [October 2005]. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171 .) That is to say, Prof. Hawking's paper is based upon invented and unconfirmed laws of physics. It's an impressive testament to the Omega Point Theory's correctness, as Hawking realizes that the known laws of physics require the universe to collapse in finite time. Hawking knows quite well that the black hole information issue must be resolved without violating unitarity, yet he's forced to abandon the known laws of physics in order to avoid unitarity violation without the universe ending in finite time via collapse. So we have confirmation from no less than Hawking himself that one can't get around the universe ending in a collapse in finite time if one sticks to the known laws of physics. The only way to get around that is to invent new laws of physics. Whereas the approach of Prof. Tipler and Prof. David Deutch (the formal founder of the field of quantum computation, being the first person to formally describe how quantum computation would work algorithmically; for which work he won the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize), who has supported the physics of the Omega Point Theory, is different. They both believe we have to take the known laws of physics seriously as true explanations of how the world works, unless said physics are experimentally refuted. Some have suggested that the universe's current acceleration of its expansion obviates the Omega Point. But as Profs. Lawrence M. Krauss and Michael S. Turner point out in "Geometry and Destiny" (General Relativity and Gravitation, Vol. 31, No. 10 [October 1999], pp. 1453-1459 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9904020 ), there is no set of cosmological observations which can tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse. There's a very good reason for that, because that is dependant on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe's collapse. As required by the Standard Model, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling. This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the positive cosmological constant. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by the inverse of baryogenesis, again via electroweak quantum tunneling (which is allowed in the Standard Model, as B - L is conserved), then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, thereby forcing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process would provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.

Steven Hawking and The EMPORERS NEW CLOTHES..Discuss