Physicist Steven Weinberg is not usually cited as one who
teases out reasons for personal despair from the realm of science. But in my
blog post entitled WHY CERTAINTY IN
SCIENCE IS UNSCIENTIFIC (June 7, 2012), I showed him doing just that. And,
as it turns out, he’s not alone. The second law of thermodynamics has evolutionary
biologist and vehement neo-atheist Richard Dawkins feeling blue.`
Writing in 1996, in the online magazine, The Humanist, Dawkins declares: “(W)e
know from the second law of
thermodynamics (which predicts that isolated systems will eventually wind down)
that all complexity, all life, all laughter, all sorrow is hell-bent on
leveling itself out into cold nothingness in the end. They—and we—can never be
more than temporary, local, buckings of the great universal slide into the
abyss of uniformity.”
In the same article, and over and over again in his books, Dawkins
has expressed delight at what science has shown us. But the above statement, profoundly
negative in tone, demonstrates, at the very least, that his is a complicated
response to impermanence on a universal scale.
I have caught him out in a rare (but telling) instance in
which he appears disappointed in reality as it is revealed by science.
He’s right, of course, that no one has yet shown the second
law can be violated; fortunes are not being made on the stock market from
investments in perpetual motion machines. The heat death of the universe (meaning,
ironically, the cessation of movement in cold, empty space), predicted by the
second law, may indeed transpire.
But to speak decisively, authoritatively, of an apocalyptic
event that may—or may not—occur billions of years in the future seems an
inappropriate scientific extrapolation.
Cyclic uncertainties
Yes, the second law does point to a universal
winding down. But consider this: our familiar universe just might come into and
out of existence over and over again.
Cyclic theories such as those proposed by Paul Steinhardt
and Neil Turok as well as by Lauris Baum and Paul Frampton circumvent
conversion of everything into “cold nothingness in the end.” Eric Chaisson’s
work, based on Ilya Prigogine’s far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, has also
brought into question the heat death scenario.
As regards cosmology, we are in the middle of a fascinating
wrangle. Various theories depict our possible fate. Uncertainty rules, and
this is as it should be.
Even Dawkins has admitted to the mysteriousness of the universe,
especially as it is revealed by quantum mechanics. He’s just forgotten that
admission here.
He knows the science, of course. But he’s not consoled.
Indeed, he seems distressed that our human experience has no obvious value or
meaning. Like many other atheists who deny that God has reserved a
unique place in the scheme of things for man, he’s still a bit upset that it’s
not the case.
Dawkins, dissatisfied with science?
There’s no getting around it. For a brief moment, the great
science apologist, Richard Dawkins, was at odds with science. His words even
hint that he would be happier with a kinder, gentler universe, one disposed
toward the human race. (It’s hard not to think of conventional religious views,
in this context.)
He’s missing the mark, of course. We should not feel
estranged from our world because of physical laws, much less because of our
theories about catastrophes those laws may bring to pass. This is just drawing out
bitterness from abstraction.
Let us mourn, lament, and rejoice. Let us feel all the
pleasure and pain it is our lot to feel, holding dear our extraordinary lives
and our extraordinary world, which is at once so beautiful and so terrible. But
let us refrain from making into something personal the notion of inescapable cosmological
disaster.
We just don’t know enough to take such speculation
seriously. There are important, pertinent matters we don’t have a clue about.
For example, the provenance of our physical laws—indeed their very nature—is unknown.
We can’t ascertain if they are human impositions onto the majestic chaos of
reality or if they possess transcendent reality, as the mathematics suggests. (We
have the same predicament with mathematics itself.)
`
If we did, in fact, “discover” the so-called laws of nature,
and they have an objective and primordial existence exactly as we have
formulated them, who’s to say even then that we have arrived at the final,
ultimate, algorithms?
And if they are primordial, what caused them to come into being in the first place? It’s
impossible to explain how everything got started without positing a prior term.
Infinite regress is unavoidable. Dawkins should remember how he himself refuted the existence of God as a final term by asking what brought God into existence.
No methodological errors, please
We are small creatures in the prodigious scheme of things. The
known universe consists of a hundred billion galaxies and a hundred billion
stars in each of them. From our vantage point on Earth, we work day and night
to unravel the unknowns of this ever-expanding cosmos, and properly rejoice at
our findings when they seem confirmed.
Over three hundred years of modern science have gone into
our current understanding of the nature of things. It’s great!
Let’s just not forget the big picture, as we spin around our
radiant star. We can—and must—try to figure out every jot and tittle of
existence. But we need always to keep in mind that we are doing so from a point
of view limited in space and time, and limited by the nature of our own human
brains.
Cosmologist Stephen Hawking, probably the most well-known
scientific figure of our time, would agree. In his 2010 book, The Grand Design, he maintains: “There
is no picture-or theory-independent concept of reality.”
This is because we undeniably filter everything through the
categories of our own minds. We cannot apprehend reality except through the
lens of our human consciousness. Our data are massaged from the git-go by the
human factor.
We would do well to admit: All-that-is, is more than our
minds can comprehend. A modicum of humility is in order, here on this “pale
blue dot” of Earth.
And isn’t humility, in light of the hypothesized multiverse,
the most scientifically respectful position to stake out, choosing to make as
few assumptions as possible?
Here’s my point: Not to acknowledge the mystery that
underlies our experience—and that underlies, as well, our great human
enterprise of science—is a serious methodological error.
Nobody, not even Richard Dawkins, should waste one moment of
life bemoaning the personal implications of scientific theorizing.
Future posts will expand on this point.
Want to know more
about Richard Dawkins? See http://richarddawkins.net/.
Your comments on this blog are welcome.
A beautifully expressed faith in the virtue of the human mind. Understanding this statement ought to be made a sacrament.
ReplyDeleteHow ironic that Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken and confrontation of the neoatheists, gets suddenly weak in the knees when he looks at the flawed future created by his own dogmatic thinking. If only he were able to find a little humility, he would see that the problem lies not within the laws of physics, but within himself. Uncertainty must be a fundamental principle of human inquiry; without it, we might all still believe that the sun, planets, and stars circle a flat, 6000-year-old earth.
ReplyDeleteMarshall Jones