Agnostic mathematician: God is in the discoveries, not in the gaps (assuming he exists)

This comment, from Logan Gage's review of David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, encapsulates why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Intellectuals often separate God and Science like fighting schoolchildren into "non-overlapping magesteria," to use Stephen Jay Gould's nomenclature. They say arguing that God (or more generally, an intelligence) is the best explanation for certain features of nature -- as intelligent design scientists do -- is a mistake. For the more nature is explained, the more this "God of the Gaps" vanishes. If God overlaps with the realm of physical reality, He is vulnerable to meddling scientists. He should stick to the safe spiritual-ethical dimension.

But has the last century confirmed this zero-sum thinking? The argument, says Berlinski, unjustifiably assumes all gaps will be filled. "Western science has proceeded by filling gaps, but in filling them, it has created gaps all over again," he writes. "Anomalies have grown great because understanding has improved." Physical theories "have enlarged and not diminished our sense of the sublime" and mysteriousness of life. How does the mystifying, unpredictable realm of subatomic particles produce breathing, thinking, worshiping creatures? We know one thing for sure: Dawkins doesn't know. But he'd rather accept an infinity of universes than a single God.

[ ... ]

This is a book in -- but not of -- our times. It is profoundly honest about the nature of human knowledge. It is postmodern without being cynical. Perhaps only an agnostic can renew science's humility without undermining its quest for truth.

My own review, "Berlinski, the Devil, and the Long Spoon", is here.

Why is the cosmological argument for the existence of God important?

I've been rereading David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (for a review I am writing), and happened on this:

It is one thing to deny that there is a God; it is quite another to deny that the universe has a cause. What remains, if the universe does have a cause, is the gap between what brought the universe into existence and traditional conceptions of the deity. This is no trivial matter. Nonetheless, the cosmological argument succeeds in displacing the burden of proof from its starting point (Is there a God?) to a place much later in the argument (Is it right and proper to think that the cause of the universe is God? ) (p. 64)

Also, on physicists' response to the Big Bang: After Penzias's famous comments,

Physicists quickly came to their senses, They discovered elaborate reasons to avoid the obvious, not least of which, the fact that the obvious was obvious. For more than a century, physicists had taken a manful pride i the fact that theirs was a discipline that celebrated the weird, the bizarre, the unexpected, the mind-bending, and the recondite. Here was a connection that any intellectual primitive could at once grasp: The universe had a beginning, thus something must have caused it to begin. Where would physics be, physicists asked themselves, if we had paid the slightest attention to the obvious." Philosophers helped by asserting that a beginning wasn't really a "beginning" But observation and theory met in the Big Bang and would not go away.

And

"Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism," the astrophysicist Christopher Isham has observed, "is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory." (P. 81)

And more. But now get your own copy. I am not spending the rest of the summer typing!

Here's the review:

Introduction:Berlinski, the devil, and the long spoon
Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science
Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does
Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism
Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

Well now, and what of Berlinski's Devils?

I am currently reviewing mathematician David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. I will post a link to the review, when I am finished, but just this for now:

The book seems to have been written primarily to deflate vast, windy claims, to strike a blow against the crass, dim stupidities currently hawked in the name of "science."

"Like democracy or justice, science is a word exhausted by its examples. We have been vouchsafed four powerful and profound scientific theories since the great scientific revolution of the West was set in motion in the svententh century - Newtonian mechanics, James Clerk Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. These are isolated miracles, great mountain peaks surrounded by a range of low, furry foothills. The theories that we possess are "magnificent, profound, difficult, sometimes phenomenally accurate," as the distinguished mathematician Roger Penrose has observed, but as he at once adds, they also comprise a "tantalizingly inconsistent scheme of things.

These splendid artifacts of the human imagination have made the world more mysterious than it ever was. We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a "warm little pond." The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that it did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found." (xii-xiii)

Berlinski does not claim to have answers, and certainly not a fevered cause to promote (except the ongoing life of the mind). He is willing to live with uncertainty. There, of course, he differs from hundreds of comparative mediocrities, proclaiming junk ideas like "meme theory" or "the selfish gene" - and assuring us that our sense that these theories are implausible is fully accounted for because our brains have not evolved in such a way as to find them plausible.

No, I suppose they have not. And that is surely something to be grateful for. Who on earth would want a brain that found these theories plausible?

"Did you imagine that science was a disinterested pursuit of truth? Well, ... "

Your latest dose of David Berlinski: Well, no, you don't have to read it, but ...

Questions about the parameters and laws of physics form a single insistent question in thought: Why are things as they are when what they are seems anything but arbitrary?

One answer is obvious. It is the one that theologians have always offered: The universe looks like a put-up job because it is a put-up job. That this answer is obvious is no reason to think it false. Nonetheless, the answer that common sense might suggest is deficient in one respect: It is emotionally unacceptable because a universe that looks like a put-up job puts off a great many physicists.
They have thus made every effort to find an alternative. Did you imagine that science was a disinterested pursuit of truth?

Well, you were wrong.

From The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (P. 112)

Yes, of course Berlinski is on YouTube. Don't write to me to complain. It's fine with me. But whatever you do, don't show this to Darwin Boy if there's a fire code in place.

Multiverse theory: Replacing the Big Fix with the Sure Thing?

In 1982, astronomer Fred Hoyle, an atheist, famously said

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with the chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

Beyond question? Perhaps, but not beyond imagination. What if there are many flopped universes? Or, whether there are or not, people are prepared to believe that they exist.

That may be true today, irrespective of evidence, mathematician David Berlinski suggests. In The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski implies that one reason for the attraction of multiverse or many universes theory, sometimes called the "Landscape", as in his comments below, is that it suits a local, modern mindset so perfectly: The idea that everything is really true somewhere "has been current in every college classroom for at least fifty years. It arises spontaneously in discussion, like soap bubbles in water." (P. 123)

He goes on to say,

The Landscape ... is all-purpose in its intent. It works no matter the theory. And it works by means of the simple principle that by multiplying universes, the Landscape dissolves improbabilities. To the question What are the odds? the landscape provides the invigorating answer that it hardly matters. If the fine-structure constant has in our universe one value, in some other universe it has another value. Given sufficiently many universes, things improbable in one must from the perspective of them all appear certain.

The same reasoning applies to questions about the laws of nature. Why is Newton's universal law of gravitation true? No need to ask. In another universe, it is not.

The Big Fix has by this maneuver been supplanted by the Sure Thing. (p. 124)

Indeed, that's precisely the problem. Atheists wanted to eliminate God by implying that our universe is not special. But do they risk eliminating science instead? After all, science consists in saying what is specifically true and what is not. But if everything is true eventually somewhere, why do science? Certainly not to develop a final theory or anything like that.

Hello, God: This is the Big Bang. Okay, look, I done it. What do I do NOW?

From David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions,

Those who believe in God and those who do not may resolve their differences by agreeing to say nothing. There is nonetheless a striking point at which Big Bang cosmology and traditional theological claims intersect. The universe has not proceeded from the everlasting to the everlasting. The cosmological beginning may be obscure, but the universe is finite in time. This is something that until the twentieth century was not known. When it became known, it astonished the community of physicists - and everyone else. If nothing else, the facts of Big Bang cosmology indicate that one objection to the argument that Thomas Aquinas offered is empirically unfounded: Causes in nature do come to an end. If science has shown that God does not exist, it has not been by appealing to Big Bang cosmology. The hypothesis of God's existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent. p. 80

Of course, science (I assume that Berlinski means by science here, physics) has not shown that God does not exist but likely the opposite. That's probably why so many atheists - when they weren't looking to alternative universes - looked to neuroscience to save their belief system, as Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain. If anything, the human brain (the most complex item in the known universe) has pretty much fried their unpalatable system and served it on stale toast. See, for example,
Materialists start to come to grips with global failure, but materialism dies hard,
"Neural Buddhists, Christians, and the Mud that failed", and
Neural Buddhism: Do neurons get reincarnated?

on why all that isn't working any more.

I will be reviewing Berlinski's book this summer (when the bench arbour is finally both warm and dry), and will link to the review.