Fundamental randomness as a design marker

Reflecting on biology and quantum mechanics in my last post made me notice that they are based on a common principle: regularity and reliability arising out of fundamental randomness at bottom.

According to quantum mechanics, subatomic particles behave in unpredictable ways (even in ways that seem downright illogical); and the regularity we observe in the world arises because when you have a very large number of particles, the individual random behaviors cancel each other out and result in a very stable, predictable system.

Biology (here I am thinking mostly of biochemistry) operates on the same principle. It all works in terms of concentrations and averages; it’s never about deterministically making sure one particular protein does a particular job, but of adjusting concentrations so that on average “enough” of a particular reaction will occur. And at a larger scale, the way living organisms utilize random change in their genomes to adapt to an environment is absolutely incredible.

This is not enough to establish that there is one Mind behind both the laws of physics and biological life, but to me it’s a hint that there is.

Reading Orthodoxy: The Ethics of Elfland and The Flag of the World

Matt Anderson and Trevin Wax are hosting a discussion of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy over the next several weeks. Follow along here. Chapters 4-5 are this week.

So, The Ethics of Elfland! I liked it so much I will probably not get to The Flag of the World. It has hugely influenced how I think about science and the world.

As I mentioned in my kick-off post, Hume’s critique of any necessary connection between cause and effect really struck me. Surprisingly, not even a probabilistic inference (the sun will probably rise tomorrow because it rose every morning for the past 10,000 years) is valid. His critique was unassailable, and it shook my faith in what I had thought of as the firm things of the world[1].
To my astonishment, Chesterton took this same sentiment (the lack of any real connection between cause and effect) and ran with it: “It is no argument for unalterable law that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it”
But where he moves next is not to despair but to wonder, in a move so obvious in retrospect I’m a little embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it that way. How magnificent it is that the world is so regular and predictable! We have no reason to expect it to be so, or even to expect it to be so tomorrow, and yet it is.

Chesterton has somehow maintained the sense of wonder that you find in very young children. As he says, “A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.” My favorite part of having an infant is getting to observe the wide-eyed wonder with which they regard ordinary things. Everything is new to them, everything is exciting, everything is fascinating. Having children really brought home to me the degree to which we enter the world with no notion at all of what it ought to be like. I think of “how to drink from a cup” to be pretty intuitive, but my one-year-old thought the best way must be to smash his face into the cup.

We’re habituated by long experience to expect the world to be the way that it presents itself to us, and to stop being amazed. But there is no rational basis for this expectation. “When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn…. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a ‘law’, for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen”.

Here I should say something about what a scientific explanation actually is, because an obvious objection is that we do have a scientific explanation for “why does an egg turn into a chicken”. We certainly know a lot more about the process than we did 100 years ago when Orthodoxy was written, but Chesterton’s is no God-of-the-Gaps critique; it cuts too deep.

This is the point: when we say that science has “explained” something, we like to think that it has told us something about the “why”, but this is false. If I answer the question “why does water boil” with a response about heat causing molecular motion, and matter state changes, and atmospheric pressure, I have only described water boiling in other terms, and in greater detail. I have not answered any “why”questions, I have only relocated them – “why do molecules move faster when they are heated?”, etc. And an answer to that question would still be vulnerable to “why?”, on and on. It follows that no matter how much I increase the detail of the explanation, I cannot answer those fundamental “why” questions[2].  At bottom, we accept the world as we find it, just like an infant does. And (via Hume) our association of experience with necessity is not a rational one.

This is not as bad as it might sound at first; but it does inject a note of humility into science. In spite of all the (very real) scientific advances we have made, the world is still a fundamentally strange and wonderful place that we have not tamed and do not understand.

In fairness to scientists, the ones I know have a healthy sense of wonder in their work. I remember a grad-school professor of mine telling us about his work in Biology: “Whenever I’ve gone wrong in my career, it’s because I wasn’t thinking wildly enough” (emphasis his). And physics, of course, has submitted to the bizarre reality of quantum mechanics since Chesterton’s time, which has mostly killed the physical determinism he describes. Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the halting problem have contributed to a sense of the limitations of human knowledge[3]. Chesterton would have welcomed all of these developments.

The result is that we live in wonderful and contingent world, made more wonderful precisely because it could have been otherwise. Chesterton conveys a unique sense of enjoyment in these features.



[1] By the way, Hume’s critique of miracles in the last chapter of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is totally incompatible with his dismantling of cause and effect earlier in the same book; so much so that it is fairly common to enlist Hume on cause & effect to critique his own argument against miracles; C.S. Lewis does this in Miracles, and Chesterton takes it to be obvious.
[2] Although a good theory will reduce the number of "why" questions that we have, by explaining phenomena in terms of fewer concepts. For instance, relativity explains why mercury is a liquid, why gold is yellow, and a great many other things.
[3] I can’t pass over the topic without highly recommending Logicomix, a fascinating graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and the search for absolute truth; complete with an examination of the relationship between logic and madness!

Expanse: Theology and an Old Earth

The heavens are telling of the glory of God; their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. —Psalm 19:1

While I was in college I began to be convinced by the scientific arguments for an old earth (something on the order of 5 billion years, and 14 billion or so for the universe). This was further cemented in grad school. It didn't line up with how I prefer to interpret the Bible, but I thought the Biblical evidence for a young earth less conclusive than the scientific evidence for an old earth (some remarks on that below). One thing that I never had, though, was a theological justification for why that should be so. It was an inconvenient belief, one that I did not know how to fit properly into the rest of my theology.

That changed when I compared the antiquity of the universe with what we are learning about God from the other sciences. As astronomy looks out it discovers unfathomable distances that testify to the magnitude of a God who fills it all. As Biology looks deep into the cell it discovers engineering far better than ours: ever-richer complexity, large interwoven networks of protein interactions, several overlapping layers of data storage in DNA, efficient energy transmission in photosynthesis (by way of quantum tunneling!). As Physics looks deeper, into the nature of reality, it finds an underlying order which bears witness to its Orderer. Below even that, we can see Divine whimsy in the chaos which this order is balanced precariously on top of. One could hardly think of a more counter-intuitive foundation than quantum physics, perhaps the richest paradox in the sciences. And when astronomy looks back on the incredible age of the universe, it tells us something about the Ancient of Days, old beyond human reckoning and seated on his throne.

In other words, the sciences are converging on Psalm 19:1. God is showing off! Everywhere we turn we see an expanse so massive that it displays a reckless disregard for our ability to understand. The heavens declare the glory of God, indeed. They have been singing it in ways that were not discovered for 14 billion years, and in ways that will never be discovered.

And that is why I think God took His time in creation. He poured Himself into it. It cannot hold his infinitude, of course, but it can give us a glimpse. And that tiny glimpse is enough to drown us a thousand times over. The great age which we find in astronomy and geology testifies to a God who is not slow as some count slowness. He is patient, eternal, and waiting for us.

Appendix: The Age of the Earth in Science and Genesis

This post is not about whether creation is old or not, it is about why an old creation is consistent with (and perhaps expected by) God's character. But I know there are lots of people (probably most of my 7 readers :-) who are still back at whether, which is a prior question to why. Briefly, this is why I think it makes sense to believe in an old creation:

1. About the accuracy of radiometric dating: yes, those methods are based on assumptions and any of them could be incorrect. However, the rocks which are used to help date the earth were tested by several different radiometric methods, and all of them gave roughly the same answer (you can find this out in 5 minutes by googling "age of the earth"). If radiometric dating methods are unreliable, wouldn't you expect them to give wildly different age predictions?
2. A shameless appeal to authority: J.P. Moreland gives an able defense of an old earth, and points out that some exceptional Hebrew scholars think the days of Genesis 1 aren't literal for textual reasons.
3. Some thoughts on the Genesis account from an old-earth perspective (take with a grain of salt, I am not an expert): Genesis does not record the creation of the earth. "In the beginning" it is formless and void, apparently covered by water. Interestingly, this corresponds more or less to the scientific account of the early earth being, well, covered by water. So even a literal reading does not provide an absolute beginning date for its creation (how long was the earth "formless and void"?). Also, the order of creation corresponds very roughly to the order in which we find animals in the fossil record - plants (including photosynthesizing bacteria?), fish (birds don't seem to fit?), land animals and finally man.
4. On the length of days in the Genesis account: the presence of evening and morning in the 3 days before the sun and moon were created argue against a literal reading, I think. The events of day 6 in Genesis 2 would be hard to fit into a 24 hour period (God creates land animals, man. Adam names all the animals, feels lonely, God creates Eve before sunset). This account (2:4-24) does not even mention the "days" of chapter 1, but it does use "day" in another sense: "in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens" (2:4). Also, there is good reason to think that the seventh day was not 24 hours. It is never closed out by the "evening and morning" formula of the other days (2:1-3), and Hebrews 3:18-4:10 make a convincing case that the seventh day is eternal: there remains a "Sabbath rest" for the people of God, in which we enter in to His rest. Verses 4:4,10 make it clear that God's rest in this passage refers specifically to His 7th-day rest from creating.

I've glossed over some of the serious theological problems caused by an old earth. The best and most honest attempt to resolve these issues that I know of is this book by Bill Dembski[1]. I obviously don't think the problems are worse than those confronting a young-earth view. However, given the theological difficulties and my preference for interpreting Scripture straightforwardly, I respect those who hold to a 7-day creation. Sometimes God requires us to trust Him in pitch darkness when all of our reason cries out against it[2]. This kind of complete submission to the Word is a virtue, and it could be that I am wrong and the age of the earth is one of those areas where God requires it of us.

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[1] Disclaimer: I've read a paper on which the book was based, not yet the book itself
[2] The faith of the thief on the cross is one of the most vivid examples of this.

The God Who Answers by Fire, He is God

A month or so ago, the sermon at church was given by a new assisting priest at Blessed Sacrament, Fr. Fox. It was fantastic. Apparently this guy has spent most of his life thinking about science and religion, and fighting liberalism in the episcopal church.

Most of the sermon focused on the harmony of science and Christianity, grounded in the fact that God is a God of truth. One of his primary examples was the showdown on Mt. Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, in which Elijah proposes a test:

Let two bulls be given us, and let them [the prophets of Baal] choose one bull for themselves, and cut it in pieces and lay it on the wood, but put no fire to it. And I will prepare the other bull and lay it on the wood and put no fire to it. And you call upon the name of your god, and I will call upon the name of the Lord, and the God who answers by fire, he is God. (I Kings 18:23-24a)

That is an experiment. Elijah is designing a test for his hypothesis (the Lord is God, Ball is made out of wood) and making a prediction. The message, Fr. Fox said, is that God is a God of truth. He isn't afraid to be tested and we shouldn't be afraid to test what He says.

While there are plenty of examples of God offering this sort of empirical proof (c.f. Gideon, Thomas), however, it seems to not be how he prefers to operate. Most of the examples involve God giving proof to stubborn people who ought not have needed it. John's gospel speaks disparagingly of those who follow Jesus because of the miracles He does, and seems to imply that those who believe because of His words have a greater faith. And then there is the parable about Lazarus and the rich man, in which Abraham says "If they did not listed to the law and the prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises from the dead." Apparently unbelief is so strong that it resists even empirical evidence. Nevertheless, there seem to be some some people that need it. And God, in his grace, condescends to them.

There is one respect, incidentally, in which the evidence God offers is not properly "scientific": it is not repeatable. If you go out to a field and make two piles of rocks, you are not likely to get Elijah's results. This undercuts one of the greatest perceived strengths of science: the fact that you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can just run the experiment for yourself. Not so with God. I think this is partly because His miracles are specifically for the people to whom they are given. And, at any rate, what would happen if they were repeatable? We would study them, and as the detail in which we could describe them increased, we would flatter ourselves that we understood them. And we would call them Law - axiomatic features of the world that can have and need no explanation, divine or otherwise.