07.01.08
Posted in Dogmatic Atheism, Belief and Disbelief-The Debate, All Things Must Pass, An Informed Mind and Conscience at 11:51 am by Brian Schuettler
This is a classical example of a scientist making comments about the relationship of God and the universe that are based on emotion and/or personal opinion without a discerning of the essential separation of physics and metaphysics.
The last paragraph of the interview includes a comment that is decidedly unscientific and outside of the evidence and observations of the material universe.
For a excellent discussion of science and faith I suggest Stephen Barr’s book : Modern Physics and Ancient Faith.
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In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.
What’s the problem with time?
The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.
Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.
We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.
What does entropy have to do with all this?
The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.
The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.
You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.
Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?
One way of explaining entropy is to say it’s the number of ways you can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don’t notice the change macroscopically.
If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.
If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.
So what’s the problem?
If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that’s a very difficult fact to explain. . . .
Difficult for who? It can’t be explained…that’s why theBig Bang theory was developed.
There’s no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.
Doesn’t that tell you something?
From a layman’s standpoint, it seems perfectly rational that things would start small and grow apart. You’re saying that’s wrong.
Many of my very smart colleagues say exactly the same thing. They say, “Why are you thinking about this? It just makes sense that the early universe was small and low-entropy.”
I’m thinking the same thing. You can’t see the merits of your colleagues superior knowledge and understanding?
But I think that is just a prejudice: . . . Because it is like that in our universe, we tend to think it is naturally like that.
Oh, so their understanding is a prejudice but yours isn’t. Right.
I don’t think there is an explanation for that in terms of our current understanding of physics. I’m just saying it’s not a fact that we should take for granted.
You are right. It is not a fact, it is a theory.
So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?Low-entropy configurations are rare.
If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it’s true that they’re in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.
That’s exactly low entropy versus high entropy.
The universe is more than what we see?
The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it’s in perfect order is not because it’s just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it’s because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out.
We’re part of a bigger structure.
That isn’t science, my friend, it is wishful thinking, it is your opinion that is no more currently verifiable than the theory you reject.
Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?
Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don’t observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.
I’m not saying this is true; I’m saying this is an idea worth thinking about.
You’re saying that in some universes there could be a person like you drinking coffee, but out of a blue cup rather than a red one.
If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there’s other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.
How many of them are there? The number could well be infinity. So it is possible that somewhere else in this larger structure that we call the multiverse there are people like us, writing for newspapers like the L.A. Times and thinking about similar questions.
A very nice story…you should consider science fiction writing as a hobby.
So how does the arrow of time fit into this?
Our experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can’t imagine a person looking around and saying, “Time is flowing in the wrong direction,” because your sense of time is due to entropy increasing. . . . This feeling that we’re moving through time has to do with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.
Entropy gives time its appearance of forward motion?
Yeah, its directionality. The distinction between past and future. If you’re floating in outer space, in a spacesuit, there would be no difference between one direction and another. However, nowhere in the universe would you confuse yesterday and tomorrow. That’s all because of entropy, and that’s the arrow of time.
Does God exist in a multiverse?
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.
Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”
So, let me get this straight. You are an atheist so God does not exist in the universe that you created. You are half right…God exists outside of the universe because He is Creator, not created. You, however, are indeed in the universe because you created nothing and are a tiny creature.
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/scimedemail/la-sci-carroll28-2008jun28,0,464680.story?page=2
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06.05.08
Posted in Dogmatic Atheism, One Nation Under God, Modernism Discussion, Dogmatic Socialism, The Primacy of Natural Law at 11:32 am by Brian Schuettler
Plato’s plan of taking children from their parents so that the state can control their socialization has few contemporary proponents. (There are, however, many fellow travelers in the educational establishment and so-called helping professions.) Nonetheless, I think we can see the tyranny of the political in our times. Much like the current abortion regime and the slavery jurisprudence of the antebellum era, proponents of gay marriage imagine that they can redefine inconvenient, permanent realities and remove traditional barriers to the relentless human desire to get what we want. The idea that “bride” and “groom” are not gender specific is a current sign of the absolute triumph of the political will. When we accept that judges and legislators possess the power to define the meaning of marriage, then it’s hard to imagine what would limit the state’s power to redefine social reality other than “personal autonomy,” which turns out to be no limit at all, since everything is desired by somebody somewhere. For all we know, Leona Helmsley wanted to marry her dog.
In short, Farrow is concerned that our present culture of tolerance is quite capable of laying the foundations for the politicization of culture. It seems counterintuitive, but the worry has been central to modern conservatism. Edmund Burke saw that revolution motivated by the unattainable ideal of equality would destroy the deep, pre-political social mores that restrain the will, including the political will; and this restraint is essential for the preservation of liberty. Our contemporary cult of tolerance differs from older fantasies of equality, but the notion that we can accommodate everybody’s desires is just as unrealistic.
Of course, we don’t actually accommodate–and we can’t. As we deconstruct social norms for personal life (and sexual relations are just part of this process), other, more violent and crueler forces take their place. Thus our current situation: a raw system of economic reward and punishment keeps most moving in a socially productive direction, with therapeutic professionals to help manage the occasional dysfunctions. For the rest we have well-armed police forces, prisons, and court-administered “family law.” This shouldn’t surprise us. Human beings cannot live together without a felt force of restraint. What should worry us is the migration of that force outward and into the hands of political actors.
—–R.R. Reno is features editor for First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
06.04.08
Posted in Dogmatic Atheism, Belief and Disbelief-The Debate, Scientific Evidence at 10:08 am by Brian Schuettler
Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science. That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth. Men of Truth The story is right about virtue: The smoothly muscled skeptical-scientific mind is a gorgeous thing—picture the Apollo of Olympia, a poised young athlete in a throng of centaurs, passion-driven half-men. Science is a virtue: a perfection of the human creature gifted with a mind, a use of the mind that, says Aquinas, “perfects the speculative intellect for the consideration of truth.” But to be “men of truth,” in the words of Exodus, is to be vulnerable to truth. Richard Dawkins speaks as a genuine scientist when he insists, “What I care about is what’s true; I want to know, is there a God in the universe or not?” Perfect. Truth is awaiting you, with its painful grip. But on the question around which Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Grayling, Onfray, and voices still to come are now springing up—the question of God—the successor of Apollo is not the atheist or the agnostic. Both lack the great virtue of the scientist, the skeptical virtue. Here they are the hankerers after comfort, the scrawny ones who prefer their own commitments over reason. No matter how excellent these thinkers might be on other questions, on this question they nimbly shift their allegiance: Between the life they like and the demands of vocation (submission to the question), they choose their lives—ironically, the very failing for which they ridicule believers. A seeker of truth has to go where the truth can be found, and to go on until it is found, and both the atheist and the agnostic are early quitters. Dawkins is right that “the question of the existence of God or gods, supernatural beings, is a scientific question,” straight from the mind hungry for truth. On that question, the path of the scientist was shown to us at the dawn of modernity by a consummate scientist: Blaise Pascal. Here was a scientific mind that brushed aside the medieval proofs of God (which did nothing for him) to attack the question anew. People may think it just an odd coincidence that the author of the Pensées, a work of apologetics, also came up with Pascal’s law, on the transmission of pressure in confined liquids, but one mind seeking one thing generated both. Pascal was a lifelong seeker of truth: “I should . . . like to arouse in man the desire to find truth, to be ready, free from passion, to follow it wherever he may find it,” he says in Pensée 119. But the scientists who have asked Pascal’s question after him are rarely scientist enough for that. They do not follow truth wherever they may find it. On the topic they have promised to illuminate, they are the defenders of Ptolemy in the age of Galileo: resisters and avoiders of scientific thought inflexibly wedded to their own commitments; and it is not hard to show this. The Skeptical Theist There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief. “Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy,” as Dawkins says—though it is odd that he does so in a discussion of Pascal, who, like him, is a skeptic. A complete misunderstanding of Pascal, however, is crucial to the way that Dawkins and every one of his fellows (past and future) always think. Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists. “I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, [nature] should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether”—but nature prefers to tease, so she “presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt” (429). “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty” (401). “We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is” (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary? This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry. Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual. The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.
If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are
by Edward Tingley
Read the entire article at Touchstone Magazine >>>>> http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-05-020-f
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