“The animal creation is captive to matter, God has given freedom to man. The animal cannot escape the law of nature, whereas man may control it, for he, containing nature, can rise above it.”
`Abdu’l-Bahá
May 20, 2012. There is a whole cottage industry – or sometimes it seems – of folks dreaming up different ways to say that science shows that we don’t need God. Usually, the argument is that this or that feature of the world is now explained by science.
Pierre-Simon Laplace is the patron saint of this form of explanation. Napoleon, receiving Laplace on a state visit to present his latest book, asked why it had no mention of God. “I have no need of that hypothesis!” Laplace replied, setting an example slavishly imitated ever since.
Don Quixote tilting at windmills comes to mind when explanations of this sort come up. Of course, the real question to ask, as people have known for more than 2,500 years, is about the origins of the laws. Where do these laws come from that lead to this or that feature of the world? Without these laws, nothing would exists, not even science.
Chance, Randomness, and God
One popular approach to disproving the existence of God is to invoke the role of chance and randomness in the theory of evolution.
The idea goes something like this. If evolution is driven by chance, then it is without direction and thus without purpose. This means – or proves, depending on the exuberance of the writer doing the arguing – that God not only isn’t needed for humans to come into existence, but that God’s role is ruled out, the later supposedly so because of the role of chance and the directionless nature of evolution. Voila! God is not needed!
Our last blog detailed some well known arguments along these lines by some famous thinkers. Today’s blog looks at the physics of chance, randomness and direction.
Basically, chance and randomness are the necessary driving mechanisms behind multitudinous physical, chemical, and biological process, many highly directional and purposeful. What this means – a conclusion I think unavoidable – is that proposals to the effect that chance, randomness, and statistical effects in evolution have larger implications about the lack of direction in life are without scientific foundation.
Atoms, Chance, and Randomness
The modern scientific worldview has certain core ideas at it heart – atomism being one of the most important (or more correctly, corpuscularianism). The basic idea is that all things are made up of particles. Wikipedia describes this view thus:
According to Aristotle, atoms are indestructible and immutable and there are an infinite variety of shapes and sizes. They move through the void, bouncing off each other, sometimes becoming hooked with one or more others to form a cluster. Clusters of different shapes, arrangements, and positions give rise to the various macroscopic substances in the world.
Our modern scientific view, which comes to us courtesy of Descartes, also include ideas from what is called corpuscularianism, which holds that the particles which make up things can be further divided. Ideas to the effect that all things are made of particles underlie not only modern science, but affect modern political and moral philosophies as well under the guise of individualism. It is one of the science’s great unifying ideas.
The Ubiquity of Randomness
What is not widely known – in fact, it sometimes seems barely known at all – is that atomism necessitates ideas of statistics, chance, and randomness if it is to have any applicability whatsover.
Let me illustrate. As I write, a gentle spring breeze wafts through my window. That breeze is composed of air molecules, mainly nitrogen and oxygen, but countless other types of molecules as well, all moving back and forth with various statistical distributions of random velocities and colliding at random times with each other. The breeze – a deterministic phenomena if there every was one (explore your air conditioner fan, if you have doubts) – is, when you look it microscopically, made up of countless particles randomly moving here and there, constantly and randomly colliding.
And when the hairs on my skin feel the breeze, it is due to the random collisions of the air molecules with those hairs that travel to my “hair transducers” and then cause chemical/electrical nerve impulses that are transmitted by random-like neural process to my CPU (er, brain). And the children chatting in the park below? I hear them through pressure variations in the air based on the same underlying motions – complete with random variations – that lead to the breeze. My brain (er, CPU) selects out the high-pitched children’s voices from the more or less random background noises – airplanes going overhead, adults talking, cars driving by, the freeway a mile away, the Safeway’s ventilation system.
The scent of flowers outside? Random scent molecules randomly detected by my nose and extracted out from other smell signals by the signal processing software of my brain.
A French Philosophe
As I type, keystrokes gate electrical pulses – composed of random distributions of electrons to my computer’s CPU (brain?) which translates them as letters.
And what do I see when I look out the window? Photons detected individually and randomly. Pattern recognition software in my eyes and brains, some hardwired, some not, translate them into an image of a young child throwing a paper airplane in the park below.
At the microscopic level, then there is always randomness all the time. It is an intrinsic and unavoidable part of the world at the most fundamental microscopic levels.
The French philosophes – and the humanists wanting to be scientific – based much of their beliefs on the 17th and 18th clockwork universe we hear so much about, but the clockwork mechanisms of that universe were – and are – made of particles in constant random motion at the microscopic level. Randomness – it turns out – is intrinsic to the universe.
Build-Up of Double Slit Interference Pattern
Quantum Randomness
The only time when random processes were stilled – or at least people thought until the 20th century – was when the temperature was absolute zero, i.e., minus −273.15° C.
But then people discovered quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, it turns out, has built-in randomness, or quantum indeterminacy. That means that even at absolute zero, there are what are called vacuum fluctuations.
Quantum mechanics goes even farther than that. All things, it turns out, can be thought of as either particles – like the particles discussed above – or as fields. And this means that the randomness inherent to particles is inherent to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is saying that randomness is at the heart of the most fundamental laws of the universe at its microscopic levels.
Dr. Tonomura of Japan’s Hitachi Central Research Institute created a famous experimental illustration of this. Using a specially-built electron microscope, he carried out a quantum double-slit experiment where electrons act as both waves and particles. The picture on the left shows the electrons arriving randomly at first with no apparent pattern (a). Then as the signal builds up, the interference caused by the wavelike nature of the electrons going past the double slit becomes evident as the furrowed pattern. Randomness, structure, and pattern all come together as the picture.
And this is not an isolated case. All image creation methods – from photographs on film to photographs from CCD cameras to vision at your eyes – share in this mix of random build-up and patterns as an essential aspect of structure and information.
All processes that we know about – ranging from the creation of the universe( if the Big Bang theory is correct) to the mechanisms of thermodynamic processes that make biological entities possible – partake of this double mechanism of determinism and randomness. It’s ubiquitous!
What Does This Mean for Evolution, Chance, and Necessity
What this means for evolution, chance, and directionless in the universe is that one cannot claim randomness and chance to be the opposite of direction and purpose. Any mechanism that we know about that is deterministic – i.e., it leads in a law-like way to certain results – has to have chance and randomness built into it. Otherwise it is not about the real world, where there are always millions, billions, and trillions – and trillions of trillions – of individual quanta and particles all interacting with each other in ways that are intrinsically random.
Adam Smith
Of course, modern evolutionary scientists know this only too well. They just forget it when they have their “Laplace moment.”
Why did Darwin include it? Well, for several reasons. One was that his argument for evolution was based in large part on breeding. In breeding, offspring show a distribution of traits, just as you would expect from randomness coming into play. Also, breeders purposefully select out offspring with traits they wish to preserve. To make a theory of natural selection – as opposed to the artificial selection practiced in breeding – Darwin had to invoke random, not purposeful, processes. Nature, not people, were doing the selecting.
There was another and equally compelling cultural reason. 19th century thought – especially economic and moral thought – was dominated by invisible hand concepts where the randomness involved in large numbers of individual actors was thought to lead to marvelous and superior outcomes (as in the combined capital/moral theories of Adam Smith). In many ways, especially in its interpretation, evolution is close kin to 19th century mercantilism and liberalism.
Next Week
Next week, I will discuss how physicists see random processes in complex system as driving the phenomena of emergence – the creation of, or more accurately, the accessing of – new states and structures. Randomness and chance are, according to emergence points of view – the driver and the creator of growth and direction.
…………………………
This is the 15th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.
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koinotely
May 21, 2012 at 3:43 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
In information theory, it seems randomness is associated with compressibility and coding. This raises the question of whether something which appears random from a microcosmic perspective necessarily is from a macrocosmic one. It seems that accidental composition is unsatisfactory if it implies there can be an effect without a cause. Perhaps there a metacauses which would be indistinguishable from so-called randomness?
“Mathematicians define a random number as one that is incompressible. In other words, it cannot be generated by an algorithm–a set of instructions or rules such as a computer program–that is shorter than the
number.”
http://everything2.com/title/Incompressible
“Randomness is not so easy to define. One approach, developed independently by Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin identifies randomness with incompressibility. “A random string admits no description shorter than the length of the string itself.”"
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~gschoene/teaching/randomness.pdf
“”This, of course, raises a question: how are their next states actually determined? What is the source of the extra tie-breaking measure of determinacy required to select their next events (“collapse their wave functions”)? The answer is not, as some might suppose, “randomness”; randomness amounts to acausality, or alternatively, to informational incompressibility with respect to any distributed causal template or ingredient of causal syntax. Thus, it is either no explanation at all, or it implies the existence of a “cause” exceeding the representative capacity of distributed laws of causality. But the former is both absurd and unscientific, and the latter requires that some explicit allowance be made for higher orders of causation…more of an allowance than may readily be discerned in a simple, magical invocation of “randomness”.
The superposition principle, like other aspects of quantum mechanics, is based on the assumption of physical Markovianism. ([40] 40 A Markoff process is a stochastic process with no memory. That is, it is a process meeting two criteria: (1) state transitions are constrained or influenced by the present state, but not by the particular sequence of steps leading to the present state; (2) state transition contains an element of chance. Physical processes are generally assumed to meet these criteria; the laws of physics are defined in accordance with 1, and because they ultimately function on the quantum level but do not fully determine quantum state transitions, an element of chance is superficially present. It is in this sense that the distributed laws of physics may be referred to as “Markovian”. However, criterion 2 opens the possibility that hidden influences may be active.) It refers to mixed states between adjacent events, ignoring the possibility of nonrandom temporally-extensive relationships not wholly attributable to distributed laws. By putting temporally remote events in extended descriptive contact with each other, the Extended Superposition Principle enables coherent cross-temporal telic feedback and thus plays a necessary role in cosmic self-configuration. Among the higher-order determinant relationships in which events and objects can thus be implicated are utile state-syntax relationships called telons, telic attractors capable of guiding cosmic and biological evolution.”
http://www.ctmu.net
Stephen Friberg
May 21, 2012 at 7:43 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hi Koinotely:
There are people who think that randomness could be the way that the Divine intervenes in things, i.e., we see it as random, God doesn’t.
The perspective I’m describing is much more along the lines of talking about processes. Why does something happen in a world where there are billions and billions of microscopic components of everything. In such a world – which is really our world – randomness is what allows things to happen, i.e., not get stuck. But it is also an unavoidable aspect of trying to have information about all the multiplicity of things happening.
Stephen
koinotely
May 21, 2012 at 11:33 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Does quantum indeterminacy or unpredictibility rule out the idea that every effect must be preceded by a cause? The concept of metacausality (Cause of causes) and causality (cause precedes effect), which is also compatible with relativistic causality. ‘Abdu’l-Baha has described accidental composition as philosophically false because every effect requires a cause. How can the concepts of causality in the Baha’i writings be reconciled or recognized in physics?
“According to classical physics, a cause simply had to precede its effect. In modern physics, the notion of causality had to be clarified.
…
In the theory of general relativity the concept of causality is generalized in the most straight-forward way: the effect must belong to the future light cone of its cause, even if the spacetime is curved.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=hl2CVR2
“. . . in what sequence members of a series of singly emitted things (e.g., electrons) will arrive is completely unpredictable.” (Wikipedia, “Double-slit experiment”)
“The electrons (and the same applies to photons and to anything of atomic dimensions used) arrive at the screen in an unpredictable and arguably causeless random sequence . . . .” (Ibid.)
“This can be proven to be false; for composition is an effect, and philosophically no effect is conceivable without causation. No effect can be conceived of without some primal cause.” – ‘Abdu’l-Baha
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/PUP/pup-124.html#pg425
“When man is asleep, his soul can, in no wise, be said to have been inherently affected by any external object. It is not susceptible of any change in its original state or character. Any variation in its functions is to be ascribed to external causes. It is to these external influences that any variations in its environment, its understanding, and perception should be attributed.
Consider the human eye. Though it hath the faculty of perceiving all created things, yet the slightest impediment may so obstruct its vision as to deprive it of the power of discerning any object whatsoever. Magnified be the name of Him Who hath created, and is the Cause of, these causes, Who hath ordained that every change and variation in the world of being be made dependent upon them. Every created thing in the whole universe is but a door leading into His knowledge, a sign of His sovereignty, a revelation of His names, a symbol of His majesty, a token of His power, a means of admittance into His straight Path….
…
As to thy question whether the physical world is subject to any limitations, know thou that the comprehension of this matter dependeth upon the observer himself. In one sense, it is limited; in another, it is exalted beyond all limitations. The one true God hath everlastingly existed, and will everlastingly continue to exist. His creation, likewise, hath had no beginning, and will have no end. All that is created, however, is preceded by a cause. This fact, in itself, establisheth, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the unity of the Creator.”
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/b/GWB/gwb-82.html
Maya Bohnhoff
May 24, 2012 at 9:32 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Why would quantum unpredictability rule out causation?
Given the human history of discovery and the hash it makes of prior “certainty” about a given premise, can we even give momentary thought to the idea that just because we cannot divine a causal relationship, say, in a sequence of quantum events (or any other kind), there is no cause that preceded the whole shebang?
Stephen Friberg
May 24, 2012 at 12:58 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hi Maya:
This whole realm of chance, uncertainty, and causality is a kind of conceptual black hole. There are all kinds of ideas that get labelled as being “accidental” or “uncaused”.
Suppose I have an accident on the way home from work. Is it uncaused? Is it “accidental” in the larger scheme of things? No, not at all. A good police investigator can work out all the causes from weather conditions to driving while on drugs to texting while driving. If not, an “omnipresent” observer certainly could.
The same holds true in principle for any “classical” event where randomness is involved (classical here means non-quantum mechanical). In principle, classically everything is knowable.
But there are several catches, known all along to perceptive thinkers but only fully explored in the last 50 years. One is that some systems are “chaotic”. If you change the initial conditions even just slightest, the outcome changes dramatically. Consider the Lorenz effect – if a butterfly in North Carolina turns left rather than right, the effect might be a tornado in Kansas rather than in Oklahoma.
Another is that we cannot do the calculations. In fact, the limitations of doing the calculations exactly are so severe that at best we can calculate the future exactly for only two isolated point particles all alone in the universe. All other calculations are at best approximate, or at worst, totally unrealistic. In principle, you can know. In practice, usually not.
So, again, classical physics is an idealization and an approximation. It works only for point particle, and exactly for at most two of them. So its usefulness depends to a very large extent on finding situations where things can act like point particles – the planets, moons, the sun – and then doing the calculations adding in corrections for non-point particle behavior. And this for situations that are linear — the simplest kind. Many, many things have nonlinear components as well.
Real world situations, to the extent that they have the millions and trillions of particles or whatever, have to be treated statistically. Which is to say that the statistics and all the quantum unpredictability that go along with the real world are what is actually there. They are stuff where causality comes to play, and the things we try to capture with the net of our mathematics and causality descriptions. Statistics and concepts of chance are among them.
robert landbeck
May 26, 2012 at 8:17 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
E.O. Wilson recently wrote in his latest book: “The creation of human society is the greatest feat that biology has ever achieved, Wilson argues, but it is also an unmitigated disaster for the planet. Overpopulation, global warming, depletion of resources, pollution and the extinction of other species threaten to end life on Earth as we know it.”
That being the case, what ever our accumulation of understanding might be or the ‘power’ or reason might suggest, we have yet to evolve the values to progress in any meaningful way. Religion as we have understood it from tradition, as one of those primary factors which inform both reason and values is as much a part of the problem as any other. With it’s moral theory founded in ‘natural law’ [just another name for biology] it is unlikely to be have anything to do with a solution.
As a species, we cannot truly describe ourselves as either rational, moral or spiritual so long as we continue in this unsustainable trajectory towards our own self made hell. http://www.energon.org.uk
Stephen Friberg
June 2, 2012 at 7:03 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Robert:
I definitely agree. There is, however, a clear trajectory to the damage done and the Baha’i Faith has a clear – but not simplistic – answer to what is needed to progress forward.
Since the Enlightenment and its embrace of science, technological prowess has grown exponentially and the conditions that Wilson describes are its consequences, not the consequences of religion except insofar as religion has informed enlightenment thought, individualism, economic determinism, nationalism, communism and capitalistic thinking. (Of course, enlightenment thought and its modern heirs have done much to bring about the awareness of the resulting problems as well.)
Enlightenment thought was – albeit not entirely – antireligious. It rejected religion and religion’s then conservative values like an emphasis on stewardship of the land for future generations, and favored instead an aggressive mercantilism and a expansionary nationalism that lead to empire building and things like the ongoing eco-disasters in Africa and countless other places. Science – it was supposed – and the benevolent powers of reason and the invisible hand that it inculcated were the important thing. Science – and of course, technology – were to be imposed in a revolutionary way and religion thrown out.
This, of course, meant that any finger-pointing as to responsibility would be targeted at science, or more correctly at the naive enlightenment embrace of science as a source of values and motivations. The positive values of the enlightenment weren’t really very scientific at all, but a heritage from the past.
So, given that – and I’m speaking roughly here – science is to blame, or more correctly science, unconstrained technology, and unconstrained attacks against religion are to blame, then an important part of the solution is to repair the rent in the fabric of our world that the enlightenment dismissal of religion created. So the solution, the Baha’i faith claims, is BOTH science and religion. They regulate and moderate each other.
Here is how I say it in an upcoming Huff post piece:
Pachomius
June 1, 2012 at 1:05 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
“Dr. Tonomura of Japan’s Hitachi Central Research Institute created a famous experimental illustration of this. Using a specially-built electron microscope, he carried out a quantum double-slit experiment where electrons act as both waves and particles. The picture on the left shows the electrons arriving randomly at first with no apparent pattern (a). Then as the signal builds up, the interference caused by the wavelike nature of the electrons going past the double slit becomes evident as the furrowed pattern. Randomness, structure, and pattern all come together as the picture.”
If I may even though I might make an ignoramus of myself, one electron appears to us to be random in time and in space, meaning in its movement we cannot know in advance its location in space in the next split second of time.
But as the experiment of Tonomura shows, when we look at many electrons, billions of them, then we can see that they make a pattern, instead of no pattern whatsoever.
So, each electron is being guided so that they as billions together in time and in space make a pattern which is then observable to us.
Randomness therefore is only in appearance when we observe one electron in its movement in time and in space, but it is actually being guided so that billions of them together in time and in space do form eventually into what? something like the nose in our face as one example in the macroscopic world of our observation.
Now, who is guiding every single electron or particle or wave whatever, who else but the uncreated creator of the created universe, i.e. God in the monotheistic faiths which hold that there is an uncreated creator of the created universe.
Pachomius
Stephen Friberg
June 1, 2012 at 4:10 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Pachomius:
There is something I didn’t mention – quantum mechanically the wave function describing the electron is perfectly deterministic. So you are correct when you note that “randomness therefore is only in appearance when we observe one electron in its movement in time and in space” provided that by appearance you mean a measurement.
The other point where you are also correct is about the billions of them together in time and space. Then, you are now longer observing quanta and the effect disappears.
Pachomius
June 9, 2012 at 3:38 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Thanks for your reply, but I must confess that for not being a physicist of sub-atomic particles I find it hard to understand your thoughts; but I really appreciate your effort to make the ideas of physicists-cosmologists accessible to people like myself, and also show how God is still relevant as creator of the universe.
What do you say, can you depart from the point that anything in the universe is either something or nothing (sic), and socalled vacuum fluctuation is also something and not nothing; but what kind of a something is vacuum fluctuation, something only in the mind of man in this case of atheist physicists-cosmologists, or out there so that even if there were no humans who can talk about it, it does exist like the grains of sand in the seashore?
What kinds of entities are such things like as I said vacuum fluctuation, or the laws of nature which according to Hawking because there are laws of nature the universe could and did(?) come forth from nothing, God is not needed?
If you ask me, the man is talking in his mind and to the minds of his colleagues but there is nothing of such a nothing but laws of nature by which the universe could and did(?) come forth from nothing.
I like to work on the distinction between ideas in the mind of man and reality outside of man’s mind, so that a lot of talks are just ideas in the mind of humans like Hawking and Stenger all the the atheist physicists-cosmologists of universe from nothing, and reality in the domain of objectively existing things like the nose in our face.
Not to flatter you, but I like to see in you someone who can bring forth this distinction and show that these folks are talking about ideas, but which have no bearing in the objective actual world of existing things like the nose in our face.
Otherwise people get the conviction that the universe including the nose in our face actually came forth from nothing; although of course Hawking and company take the trouble to mention the laws of physics or nature, or vacuum fluctuation or multi-verse or M-theory, whatever.
Hope to hear from you next time I check into this site.
Thanks.
Pachomius
Stephen Friberg
June 9, 2012 at 6:19 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hi Pachomius: Again, your insights and questions are right on the money. There is a New York Times philosophy blogger – see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/can-physics-and-philosophy-get-along/ – who addressed your questions last week very nicely. For example:
From this perspective, everything comes from the laws of nature except the laws of nature, and they come from God. This is the ultimate answer to why we have something rather than nothing, and the proof of its power is that it is usually ignored by atheists. Occasionally, a bold atheist – Dawkins comes to mind – will make a dash at bringing it down, but usually – and Dawkins again comes to mind – they end up looking like a fool.
One school of thought – the Platonists, some call them – says that the laws of nature – or the mathematical aspects of those laws – are what is real and that every thing in the world is an imperfect realizations of these laws (or, if you will, eternal “forms”).
Other, call them empiricists, say no. Only what we see, feel, and can sense is real and our explanations are merely attempts to capture their regularity.
About quantum mechanics, opinions vary. Some say that it is just a theory forced on us by having to explain empirical facts. Some say that the empirical facts reflect underlying sets of universal truths.
My take is that all of our physical theories are our attempts to understand reality and are necessarily idealizations. But they mirror and capture aspects of that underlying reality. At higher levels where things like mind and intelligence come into play, we see its the unique powers of the mind to develop those same theories – and control nature through them -but we don’t understand the mind.