Hard Pressed and In Pain

Embarrassing and Awkward

One of the delicious ironies swirling around cosmology and the study of matter is that the possible options are few and far between.  What makes the universe a law-complying realm?  Or alternatively, "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws?"

The possible answers to that question are only three.  One solution is to presuppose the eternal, all controlling, all commanding, all conditioning Conditioner.  But this answer is disturbing and offensive to fallen man, the one asking the question.  The reason is that man to consider God as the One who makes the universe follow laws with any degree of objectivity.  Why?  Because man cannot be neutral on the subject.  Man has form in denying this as the solution to the problem because of a fundamental and abiding conflict of interest.  To acknowledge the existence of such a Being is necessarily to require worship, adoration and service to Him.  No other consequent would make any sense.  But since fallen man hates God and His threat to human autonomy, man cannot be neutral or objective in dismissing this solution to the problem of "why?" the cosmos acts in the law-abiding way it does.  It is the answer that is the least palatable and the last to which he will give consent.

The second answer offered is that electrons follow natural laws because the laws of nature are necessary--they just are.

The Parlous State of Particle Physics

"I Know Nothing"

We came across a hilarious piece by David Berlinski the other day, lampooning the current state of particle physics.

But some background is in order.  Back in the day, Christians and Jesus Christ used to be lampooned by secularists and atheists for the "God of the gaps" reflex.  This was when secularist and materialist science was in its heyday.  The science v. religion paradigm was portrayed as knowledge versus ignorance.  Before the rise--and dominance--of the secularist paradigm, the ignorant explained what they did not know or understand with reference to a Deity.  "Why do rainbows exist?"  Answer: "I don't know.  God knows and He makes them."  But as more and more knowledge came into existence about the natural world of matter and how it works, the gaps in our knowledge shrank.  Consequently, the "God of the gaps" got smaller and smaller.

We don't need God any more to explain things, said the secularists and materialists.  They happily retired Him to the House of Lords, whilst everyone got on with genuine reality.

Science is Anything But Disinterested In The Truth

Hah! We Fooled You

We have spoken of a paradigm shift possibly beginning to occur within the standard materialist view of the universe.  Scientists find themselves at the Osgiliath cross roads, scratching their heads, wondering which way to go.  They remain, however, strongly convinced and adamantly consensual on one quintessentially certain point: there is no way Christian cosmology can, would, or ever be true.

David Berlinski has a sparkling description of the cross roads.

"Scientists," the physicist Paul Davies has observed, "are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth--the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.  The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.  For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all to convenient 'coincidences' and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist.  Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal."  [Cited in David Berlinksi, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 110f.]

How to account or explain this?  What sophisticated theorems could be devised to confuse the average punter?   Aliens might prove useful.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

The Great Urban Legend Of Our Time

Evidentialism is the doctrine that demands everything one believes must be adequately grounded upon evidence. If no evidence, then belief is irrational.  Whenever we come across such sweeping, grandiose assertions, we find ourselves driven to ask, "By what evidence does that assertion hold true?"  Pray, what is the evidence for evidentialism?  Eerrrr.  Ummmm.  More time, please.

David Berlinski is on to it when he writes:

It is wrong, the nineteenth-century British mathematician W.K. Clifford affirmed, "always, everywhere, and for anyone, to  believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  I am guessing that Clifford believed what he wrote, but what evidence he had for his belief, he did not say.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.  (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 47.]

Fast forward to the Great Collider in Europe.   Naturally, this Collider is most famous because it is the biggest.  Twenty-seven kilometers of underground tunnel to house the great beast--all in an effort to research the tiniest particles in matter.  The biggest to find the smallest.  Looking for evidence.  So that the evidentialist can believe.   But what constitutes evidence?  Instantly, the "picture" becomes exponentially more complex, and less evidential, we may say.

Rational Irrationalism

Quantum Mechanics and the Big Bang

The reviewer for the Dallas Morning News must have been having a bad hair day.  He or she declared that Leon Lederman's The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) was "the funniest book about physics ever written."  If that were true, physics must be world's apart from sophisticated humour.  Closer to the truth is Lederman's penchant for geeky humour, which often falls flat and is overdone.  Hardly humorous, unless the author was engaged in self-parody, which would be another matter entirely. 

But, humour aside, as a book about particle physics, Lederman's The God Particle is pretty good.  It covers all the usual "stuff".  The micro-world of the atom is counter-intuitive and abnormal (as far as our human experience is concerned).  Federman writes

So forget about normal; expect shock, disbelief.  Niels Bohr, one of the founders, said that anyone who isn't shocked by quantum theory doesn't understand it.  Richard Feynman asserted that no one understands quantum theory.  (Op cit., p. 143f)

 The overwhelming impression for the non-specialist lay reader is of extreme complexity in the micro-world of matter.

Ineffable Glories

Beyond Fear and Wonder

We have a hard time conceptualising the smallness of atoms and, therefore, the number of them.  The Guardian, in a piece entitled 20 Amazing Facts About the Human Body contained the following factoid:

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around  7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

The number of atoms in the material universe is finite but uncountable.  The number of atoms in just one human body is hard enough to reckon with.  But it gets even more difficult.  Particle physicists--both of the theoretical and experimental kind--tell us that that the standard model of the atom now consists of a dozen or so particles and four forces.  This would suggest that one human body is made up of far more than 84 octillion atomic particles (since there are multiple sub-atomic particles of the same type in each atom). 

All of these particles are behaving in exactly the way they are commanded to behave.  There are two ways to think about these commands.  The first is the dominant view of our time.