A Cascade of Errors

It's amazing how some mechanisms in the human body work.  Blood clotting is one example that has always struck me as nothing short of miraculous.  Seemingly the whole system had to be in place from its onset because of the "cascade" effect of thinning and thickening required for a cut on the human body to heal over without either bleeding out or seizing up.  In some instances in human thought, however, the cascade effect is obvious and just as disturbing and the blood clotting mechanism is fascinating.  In an article in our local paper today originally published by the McClatchy News Service, author Shawn Lawrence Otto has written a book about the lack of scientific discussion by political candidates (particularly presidential candidates) in recent history. You can link to the article here. 

Mr. Otto begins innocently and correctly enough by postulating that there is a necessity in an efficient government  for a well-informed electorate.  He states that "Without the mooring provided by the well-informed opinion of the people, governments may become paralyzed or, worse, corrupted by powerful interests seeking to oppress and enslave."  He also plumps for decisions to be made on information based in factual reality.  Beyond these opening points, however, there is a cascade of poor reasoning.  He goes on to suggest that politicians in general, and the Republican party in particular, have jettisoned all acknowledgement and reference to science in making policy decisions due to the influence of religion.  He states that the Republican party has "gone anti-science" partially due to the fact that "evangelicals got involved in politics."  So apparently for those belonging to the Republican party, there is a pre-requisite or at least an overwhelming pressure to be "anti-science" because the party is "pro-evangelical."

My nature prior to my conversion to Christianity was to be sarcastic to the extreme.  I fight against the continued temptation to be snarky and sarcastic in any thought process or discussion.  In this instance I will go with a measured response only laced with sarcasm pointed directly at the idea just posited, not at Mr. Otto personally.  To wit:

"So the idea is that those who have a cogent and internally consistent answer for the four most important questions in human existence; those of origin, meaning, morality and destiny, and have among their ranks a host of the most prominent names in many of the most important scientific discoveries in human history, and have a good reason both to engage in the discovery of new empirical physical truths and an explanation for the ought of the usage and temperance of use and distribution of new discoveries should be expelled from the discussion because those who are politicians by career take advice from their advisors and political constituents policy decisions with an emphasis on scientific data less than would be deemed necessary by those who choose for their careers fields in the scientific - is that correct?"

It just seems so blatantly ridiculous to even bring the evangelical view into the discussion in the first place.  It seems the spectre of "separation of Church and State" raises its head to choke off serious consideration of deeply important topics any time politics and government is involved.  Of course science is important and should be considered as the data is available on policy issues in which science comes naturally to the fore.  However, it seems wildly irresponsible to accuse evangelicalism as the primary source of a lack of drive to enact laws relative to global warming (or climate change as it has now been articulated).  What I find most ironic is the charge that the one area of human reasoning that can even speak about the morality of laws being adopted, the only realm that can make decisions of ought that would hold abuse and corruption in check (namely the Christian world and life view) is summarily discarded because of its stand against science, which is in itself a complete misrepresentation and misapplication of any reasonable Biblical position.

I guess i'm just continually flummoxed by the inability to recognize that one recognize that science is absolutely critical for making empirical evaluations for the physical issues experienced and influencing all of humanity and that science must be tempered by religion because of its complete impotence with regard to the metaphysical and moral issues that run hand in hand with any scientific discovery.  The Bible is not a science textbook and was never intended to be such, and science has been and will continue to be fruitful in making amazing discoveries relative to the make-up and intricate workings of the universe we inhabit, but science cannot and will never be able to stand alone in providing any information whatsoever as to how we ought to engage in or properly utilize that information within the interpersonal reality of human existence.  It seems inevitable that the two must not be put at odds with one another, but rather be inextricably tethered, else monstrous results be manifest.

Understating the Case

December 14 and dateline Geneva, the Associated Press has published a story entitled Physicists close in on elusive subatomic particle in which praises are being sung for the real possibility that the Higgs boson will soon be discovered.  Richard Higgs is attributed with postulating the existence of a subatomic particle that explains the existence of mass in the elements that make up the atom.  Equations in physics that have been used and work out in the real world (i.e. correctly and accurately explain observed behavior) assume that electrons, for example, have mass.  Frank Wilczek said, "Since the equations have worked so brilliantly now for decades, it's really nice to dot the i's and cross the t's."  A theoretical physicist at FERMI has explained the Higgs boson this way:

"What hides the symmetry between the weak and electromagnetic interactions? That is the question we hope to answer through experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. When the LHC is commissioned, around the year 2005, it will enable us to study collisions among quarks at energies approaching 1 TeV, or a trillion (10¹²⁾electron volts. A thorough exploration of the 1-TeV energy scale will determine the mechanism by which the electroweak symmetry is hidden and teach us what makes the W and Z particles massive.

"The simplest guess goes back to theoretical work by British physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. According to this picture, the giver of mass is a neutral particle with zero spin that we call the Higgs boson. In today's version of the electroweak theory, the W and Z particles and all the fundamental constituents--quarks and leptons--get their masses by interacting with the Higgs boson. But the Higgs boson remains hypothetical; it has not been observed. That is why particle physicists often use the search for the Higgs boson as a shorthand for the campaign to learn the agent that hides electroweak symmetry and endows other particles with mass.  Chris Quigg in Scientific American 

So the quest that is stated to be coming to a head is actually finding the correct range of possibility and nailing down with some certainty the existence of a theoretical particle that explains why equations in physics actually work. Chriss Quigg says elsewhere in the same paper "Over the next 15 years, we should be able to find a real understanding of the origin of mass. The interest lies not just in the arcana of accelerator experiments but suffuses everything in the world around us: mass is what determines the range of forces and sets the scale of all the structures we see in nature.

This is very exciting stuff. Human beings able to "see" subatomic particles that explain the mass of all the structures we see in nature. Not it must be noted that there are other theories if all the supercollider experiments do not show the Higgs boson. The two most well accepted both assume there is not one single particle, but a number of as yet undiscovered sub-atomic particles that are associated with known particles. Supersymmetry assumes several Higgs bosons, while dynamical symmetry breaking assumes the Higgs boson is a composite that is made up of multiple constituents that will need to be discovered once the Higgs boson itself is observed. In any event, the use of supercollider technology to experiment at high energy ranges allows for discoveries at the subatomic level with great expectation for remarkable results.

As interesting as all the physics and possible discovery is the statement made by physicist Howard Gordon of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York when he said, "It's hard to find, not because it is especially tiny, but because it is hard to create." I would say that a decade of construction and research into a 17-mile tube charged to 1 TeV (trillion electron volts) would classify as hard. The really funny thing about this comment is that all this effort has gone in to discover the range in GeV within a range of statistical certainty the Higgs boson might exist within to declare it has been observed. Not really creation at all, is it. The Higgs boson is also called the "God particle" as it is hoped to explain why anything in this universe has mass and why after the Big Bang everything slowed down instead of just racing outward to infinity and all we know never came to be as we know it.

Supposing a range with statistical certainty is achieved such that the Higgs boson is "observed", or multiple Higgs bosons are "observed", or a whole range of new particles and their possible constituents are "found" what physics still cannot tell is where the first elements necessary to produce the "Bang" came from, nor why knowing any of these things matters (why there is something rather than nothing). Science is completely impotent regarding these matters. We certainly aren't creating anything, as all the elements and particles already exist and are "waiting" for us to observe them. We also continue to find more and more intricate interaction between elements and particles in science whether it be in particle physics, microbiology or other field of study. We know an astronomically detailed and complex series of particles and elements work independently and in concert with others in ways we cannot yet fully describe or understand but which must be so for our tests to even be performed in the first place. We should be excited about how far we have come in such discoveries, we should be amazed that even at the level of observation now possible there is still so much we do not know and must theorize about, and we should be humbled that there is no good reason for any of it to be this way and yet we are capable of participating in such exploration. As complicated and detailed the scientific discoveries will continue to be in the future we must remember that all these observed particles, elements and particles came from absolutely nothing (no energy, substance or potential) and the sum total of all scientific discoveries provides no meaningful answers to even the most basic questions of relationships between the discoverers and anything else in existence.

We need not pursue a "God particle", but the God who created all things and who holds all things together, and who provides a reason for human existence, a purpose for our existence, and the possibility of relationship with the One who is sovereign over all we observe and understand. Let us not understate the case, nor let us discover in vain.

Of Science and Religion

I just finished a book by John Polkinghorne called Belief in God in an Age of Science.  I'm including some excerpts from the book here and some comments because of the rift between religion and science in contemporary culture.  I hear so often these days comments like "just leave science to the scientists" or "you religious wackos need to stay out of science".  We are tending today to become more and more specialized in particular areas of interest both academically and vocationally.  Combine that with a secular conciousness where religious ideas, institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance and it's easy to see why people would tend to see a human being able to seperate out science, metaphysicis, philosophy, religion, sociology, etc.  Each one compartmentalized and seperated so that one doesn't cross over and meddle into the affairs of the other.  The reality is that the disciplines do overlap and that point, among others, is brought out very well in this book.

First a word about Dr. Polkinhorne, and to do that i'll just quote from the back book jacket:

"John Polkinghorne, K.B.E., F.R.S., is past President and now Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Liverpool, England.  He is the winner of the 2002 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities."

Dr. Polkinghorne is a theorhetical physicist, specializing in the area of quantum physics, and a comitted Christian.  He is no slouch when it comes to scientific matters and so his thoughts are well worth thinking about and should be given credance.  His position is summarized in the Preface to the book when he states: "This book presents a series of variations on a fundamental theme: if reality is generously and adequately construed, then knowledge will be seen to be one; if rationality is generously and adequately construed, then science and theology will be seen as partners in a common quest for understanding."  Personally, i've never seen science and religion at war with one another, or the thought that one must exist in distinction from another.  History has shown that scientific discovery has flourished in a general atmosphere of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as those scientists set out to discover the wonders of God's creation.  Following is just a smattering of quotations from the book and some thoughts.

"The world is not full of items stamped 'made by God' - the Creator is more subtle than that - but there are two locations where general hints of the divine presence might be expected to be seen most clearly.  One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year-history of evolving development following the big bang.  The other is the 'thinking reed' of humanity, so insignificant in physical scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself.  The universe and the means by which that universe has become marvellously self-aware - these are the centers of our enquiry.
     Those who work in fundamental physics encounter a world whose large-scale structure (as described by cosmology) and small-scale processes (as described by quantum theory) are alike characterised by a wonderful order that is expressible in concise and elegant mathematical terms...Attempts have been made to explain away this fact.  No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have moulded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded for pressures for survival.  Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life."

It is interesting to note that it is easy enough to say that things came to be through a process of chance and time, but when we press the issue of why things are exactly what they are do we find problems with the chance and time explanation.  Because of the multitude of things necessary to happen for things to be exactly what they are, the probabilites force an infinite number of universes and an infinite amount of time to come up with the chance happening of what we know to exist the way it does, and as Dr. Polkinghorne points out arranged such that it can be measured and expressed in understandable mathematical forms.  We know there has not been infinite time, nor an infinite set of universes so there must be some other explanation.

"I have said that I do not expect top-down agency to be just a conglomerative effect of a lot of little bits of bottom-up interactions (in the way that the temperature of a gas is the average of the individual kinetic energies of its molecules).  If holistic causality is present it must be there as a genuine novelty, and the structure of the relationships between the bits and pieces must be open enough to afford it room for manoeuvre.  In some sense there must be gaps in the bottom-up account which this top-down action fills in, but those gaps must be intrinsic and ontological in character and not just contingent ignorances of the details of the bottom-up process.  They must be 'really there' if they are to provide the causal joint for which we are looking.
     A popular site for such explorations has been the uncertainties of quantum events...The continuing perplexities about the quantum measurement problem remind us that we do not fully understand how the levels of the microworld and the macroworld interlock with each other...The way a chaotic system traverses its strange attractor seems a more promising model fors such open developments, and this has been the basis for my own suggestions.  We can consider the many different trajectories through the attractor's phase space (that is, the range of its future possible states) which all correspond to the total energy.  Their different forms are understood as arising from the effects of vanishingly small disturbances that nudge the system along one path or another, the diverging characters of these different paths corresponding to the chaotic system's extreme sensitivity to perturbations.
     It is this sensitivity that produces the intrinsic unpredictabilities.  In a critical realist re-interpretation of what is going on, these epistemological uncertainties become an ontological openness, permitting us to suppose that a new causal principle may play a role in bringing about future developments...Thus a realist reinterpretation of the espistemological unpredictabilities of chaotic systems leads to the hypothesis of an ontological openness within which new causal principles may be held to be operating which determine the pattern of future behavior and which are of an holistic character.  Here we see a glimmer of how it might be that we execute our willed intentions and how God exercises providential interaction with creation."

Fascinating stuff really.  Behavior at the quantum level is chaotic is unmeasureable, except as a range of possibilities of behavior (called phase range).  So there are many possible paths each with their own range of probability, this is the epistemological uncertainty.  What Dr. Polkinghorne is saying is that while being epistemologically uncertain provides an ontological openness so that what actually occurs (or put another way, which path in the set of possibilites is actually chosen) can be acted upon by a causal agent outside the system, namely God providing information to direct the process.

These matters are interesting to think about, because we are hit more and more with the advances in science pushing God out and making religion obsolete.  It seems the further down science is parsed, into the quantum realm, there is an uncertainty of what might happen coupled with an observation of what actually occurs.  Something must move things from the chaotic (or uncertain) to the actual (or real).  Because we are discussing acts at the quantum level the causal agent cannot be us, nor does it seem plausible to think it would be "Nature", as it were, as a non-thinking uncaring process for the simple fact that we are thinking moral beings.

I'll end this post with a final quotation from the book from some of the closing remarks:

"The arguments will continue, for deep metaphysical questions do not lend themselves to knock-down answering.  There is a reminiscence here of the medievel debates between the realists and nominalists.  Nevertheless, I believe there is a much more persuasive case for believing in the reality of the Mandelbrot set then in the reality of the Idea of a lion.  There is a realm of physical experience containing sticks and stones.  There is also a realm of mental experience containing the truths of mathematics.  These are not disjoint realms but they are parts of an interlinked complementary created reality, as our 'amphibious' experience as embodied thinking reeds testifies, and as is also witnessed to by the 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematical pattern as the clue to the structure of physical law.  I believe that mathematics provides a powerful - and for a scientist, readily accessible - encouragement to eschew physical reductionism and to embrace a generous view of the mental/material nature of reality."