Over in LiveJournal land, Sherwood Smith links approvingly to an essay by Tom Simon in response to what are apparently some “logical positivist” evles in Christopher Paolini’s books. I haven’t read the books in question, but it really doesn’t matter, as Simon very quickly spins this off into a larger essay about the nature of the world, in the mode of C.S. Lewis:
In my life, I have never witnessed an instance where the laws that govern the world sufficed to explain an event. That is, I have never seen anything that was not, strictly speaking, the after-effect of a miracle. Many events have been within my ability to explain, but I am convinced that I succeeded, not because I am not woefully ignorant about the universe, but because a deity set up the workings of nature in such a way that analysis is possible even from grossly imperfect information.
For in strict truth, as Lewis points out, the laws of nature do not explain any event that actually happens. For instance, the laws of physics state that it is possible to have a particle with a unit negative charge, and a spin of one-half, and such and such a mass, and various other properties, which we call an electron. They further state that if you have an electron, it will behave in various (more or less) predictable ways. It will, for instance, repel other electrons and not attract them; it will orbit an atomic nucleus, if available, in one of a fixed set of possible energy states, but not in any intermediate state; and so on. But the laws do not state that there has to be an electron. You have to supply that for yourself; or have it supplied for you, which is what most of us do.
From there, he goes on in a direction you could probably guess from the mention of C. S. Lewis:
It can be objected that given the laws of physics as they are, electrons must appear under certain conditions. But this is only to beg the question. How did the conditions arise? For that matter, why should the laws of physics be that way? Some physicists make a jolly game out of investigating the properties of Flatland, a two-dimensional space that exists (so far as we know) only in their imaginations. It turns out that in Flatland there is no such force as magnetism, and a lot of the other laws of nature as we know it must be drastically altered. So would they be in a four-dimensional space; and four or two are not more arbitrary numbers than three. We happen to live in a three-dimensional universe, but we don’t know why. (Even Lisi’s head-splitting ‘Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything’ doesn’t manage to explain that.) For that matter, anybody who follows fractal theory knows that there is no necessary reason why the number of dimensions in space even has to be an integer.
The universe we live in is a strange and improbable place — perhaps infinitely strange. It is no more necessary that there should be a place where electrons can exist, than that I should have a bank account containing a million dollars. Only one of these things happens to be true. It would be a strange and unaccountable thing, a miracle of economics, if I woke up tomorrow to find that I had a million dollars in the bank. I could only conclude that someone unknown to me put them there. And it is a strange and unaccountable thing that Someone, or Something, produced a three-dimensional space with an additional dimension of time, and filled it with the energy, and subjected it to the laws, that together produced the universe we know. If I did not know better, I should call that Someone or Something God. And in fact I don’t know better, and so I do call Him by that name.
I’m a little hesitant to write about this here, because I’m a lot more tolerant of religious language than most of the ScienceBlogs family, and this kind of gets up my nose. There’s a kind of smugness to this that I find really irksome. But again, you could’ve gotten that from the C.S. Lewis name-drop.
On a less emotional level, I think this argument suffers from the same basic flaw as the Paul Davies piece from a week or two ago. Davies attempted to put science and religion on equal footing, by saying that science requires faith that the world will behave in an orderly and rational manner. Which works, but only through doing some violence to the conventional definition of “faith”– it’s true that the logical and orderly nature of the universe is an assumption without proof, but it’s an assumption that you have to make to do anything. The alternative to a belief that the universe is orderly and rational is total paralysis– if you discard that, not only would you not be able to do science, you wouldn’t be able to go to the store.
Simon is doing the same thing with the word “miracle.” It’s true that there’s no particular reason why the universe has to exist, but if you define existence itself as a “miracle,” then you’ve sort of lost contact with the rest of the English-speaking world, who use the word in a very different way. As with Davies’s claim, it’s an unbeatable argument– how can you lose, when you get to define words to mean what you need them to mean?– but not one that goes anywhere useful.
I would be perfectly fine with the whole “isn’t existence marvelous?” thing, though, if that’s where it ended. The universe is an amazing place, and it’s occasionally good to take a moment to contemplate just how cool it is (not too often, otherwise you’d never get anything done, but every now and again). What bugs me, though, is the attempt to leverage this into an argument for the existence of God, and a fairly particular God at that.
Awe at the wonders of the universe is all well and good, but it’s not proof of anything. Tacking God on at the end of this just makes it a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which has been failing to be entirely convincing since the days of Aristotle. So Simon has a version that mentions electrons and Garrett Lisi. That and a dollar will get you $1.02 Canadian.