God & Science: A Look at Possibilities

[waht]

Every single evidence coming from cosmology, astrophysics to evolutionary biology points overwhelmingly to the fact that all the stars, elements, compounds, and life were created in a bottom-up way, where more complex building blocks arose from simpler building blocks coming together.

If God defined as a "Supreme Being that created the universe" in most dictionaries - one would expect any evidence of a supreme being to point to a top-down approach. But none is found.

Everything in the universe has built itself up from simpler building blocks.

Hence science has already answered that God doesn't exist.

 

[DaveC426913]

one would expect any evidence of a supreme being to point to a top-down approach.

This is the non sequitur in your logic.

1] There's no reason why that would be so. Many suggest God set up the universe as if a clock, wound it up and then just let it go.
2] It is wise never to presume to understand the rationale of alien life forms. I'd say this goes double for creators of universes.

 

[Integral8850]

This debate has been interesting. I have had the opportunity to view the atheistic side of life (until mid-twenties) as well as the theistic side, now. While there is no "proof" there is a God there is Faith. Defined, firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust . Let's assume God comes this evening, shows himself/herself to all and say's "obey my commandments and repent or else you will suffer eternal damnation." What then? God of course would not do that due to the concept of freewill. Just like if we could magically make someone fall in love with us, deep down inside you know it would not be true. There is a key to enter the kingdom of God and it is called faith. Unless you have faith in God you cannot understand the way that it can transform your life. The bible has multiple verses about multitudes that will not have faith, "the path is wide and the gate is narrow for those who will enter the kingdom of heaven" for example. I can attest that there is a God and God has transformed my life. My point is unless you have faith firm belief in something for which there is no proof that there is a God you will not understand.

My 2 cents!

 

[zomgwtf]

I am. Did I not say that?

Most atheists I know are comfortable with their stance. They have chosen it.

I'm an atheist who ... well ... I guess wishes the world were otherwise.

Well I'm just pointing out that there's no difference between the position you take (wishing God existed) and just saying that such and such is bunk. I mean sure sometimes I wish God (read Western Modern concept of god) existed and I even call out to him sometimes.

Like when Team Canada played against Russia and USA in the olympics? I was yelling 'to god' so loudly that you'd think the charismatic movement was taking place right inside my living room. Or during this years playoffs, I want a Canadian team to take the cup GO MONTREAL! (You get the point)

Hey. I don't roll that way.

This actually made me laugh out loud...



Actually I'm still kinda giggling from it. Yes, I said giggling. What of it?

 

[russ_watters]

I didn't know the word "believe" had only one definition.

It has one applicable definition. And no, a definition you've made up yourself doesn't qualify. Please stop playing games here. When you have a difference of opinion about a definition, a one-liner has no value other than to provoke. Provide the definition you are using, with a justification for why it is applicable and where it comes from.

 

[zomgwtf]

This is the non sequitur in your logic.

1] There's no reason why that would be so. Many suggest God set up the universe as if a clock, wound it up and then just let it go.
2] It is wise never to presume to understand the rationale of alien life forms. I'd say this goes double for creators of universes.

I believe he is specifically attempting to counter 'Intelligent Design' claims in which case he is correct.

(for the most part)
One little part though is that God could simply have set up everything in order to make it appear to have been built that way. We then claim he's a deceiver. But maybe his intentions weren't to deceive! Maybe the way everything built itself is supposed to lead us directly to superior knowledge of him!

Who knows.

 

[DaveC426913]

Why not God is an interesting question, but it's kind of been done to death, don't you think?

I propose some more interesting questions:

Why nand God?
Why xor God?

 

[GreatEscapist]

Who knows.

God does.

Faith is the only way to go with God. Either you have it, or you don't. I can't. Some people can.
I just hope I don't go to hell, if there is a God. Maybe, since I tried, I'll get like, a get-outta-jail-free pass into heaven. I won't get all the rewards as some other people, but at least I'm there.

 

[GreatEscapist]

Why not God is an interesting question, but it's kind of been done to death, don't you think?

I propose some more interesting questions:

Why nand God?
Why xor God?

Brilliant. Let's see how long it takes before those are closed.

 

[zomgwtf]

I'm surprised the thread has been allowed to continue so long.

I tend to agree with what your saying though GreatEscapist. However if God turns out to merely judge based on your belief in him then I don't think I really would mind spending eternity with Lucifer or what have you.

Here's one of my favorite quotes, from one of my favorite people:
‘Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.’

-Marcus Aurelius

 

[waht]

This is the non sequitur in your logic.

The top-down approach implies a complete design like from blue prints, every building block, and sub-building block carefully crafted so that all the pieces work together as designed. It's like designing a skyscraper.

And science killed this was the case. The only remaining building scheme is a bottom-up approach.

The bottom-up approach is basically starting with a seed, or completely independent systems that randomly interact, and branch out in irregular ways. Whatever comes out of it will be an emergent process that will interact with other emergent processes, and so on.

The question is, can a supreme being utilize a bottom up approach to create the universe?

Suppose so. Then by the definition, everything that happened, the Holocaust, earthquakes, rapists, oppression of people, sinking of the Titanic, the Shoemaker comet flying into Jupiter is an emergent process as designed. The sheer pointlessness of other emergent processes is just astounding - just to get us here for 75 years?

So it seems this case would be more of an non sequitur?

That is from the action of all powerful Supreme Being, it follows there is lots of pointlessness.

And so I think it's unlikely that a Supreme Being created the universe. It's so unlikely that I'm not going to kid myself. He simply doesn't exists IMO, until such time as there is evidence.

 

[zomgwtf]

And so I think it's unlikely that a Supreme Being created the universe. It's so unlikely that I'm not going to kid myself. He simply doesn't exit IMO, until such time as there is evidence.

Why don't YOU rock my avatar too!

http://outcampaign.org/

 

[waht]

Why don't YOU rock my avatar too!

http://outcampaign.org/

It looks nice. But is there any point in wearing it in physicsforums? Almost everyone here is atheist/agnostic?

This would go well on a bumper sticker though.

 

[DaveC426913]

Why don't YOU rock my avatar too!

http://outcampaign.org/

OK, your new avatar makes a bit more sense now...

 

[apeiron]

Every single evidence coming from cosmology, astrophysics to evolutionary biology points overwhelmingly to the fact that all the stars, elements, compounds, and life were created in a bottom-up way, where more complex building blocks arose from simpler building blocks coming together.

Science also has room for top-down causality - global constraints. And also for theories of meaning - semiotics being an example.

If you study systems science, hierarchy theory, ecology, neuroscience and other stories of self-organisation, you can see that bottom-up causality - local atomistic/mechanical construction - is only half the total story.

Science has become publicly identified with bottom-up causality of course. Indeed, it is what most computer scientists and physicists also believe . Which has left an unfortunate marketing gap for theists to claim ownership of top-down causality.

Though as is remarked, theists can also claim the whole bottom-up science story is set in train by a wind it up/let it go style god.

It is interesting to ask what you will end up believing as the meaning of life if instead you are an atheistic systems scientist.

It used to be that a lot of holists and systems scientists did believe that some spiritual-like comfort and meaning would lie in this "whole of things" approach. It attracted a lot of catholic scientists and new agers as a result.

Then growing out of this has been a more techno-triumphalist theory of meaningful existence. Kurzweil's singularity, Tippler's Omega point and de Chardin's noosphere. The idea here is that complexity is the magic word. The natural goal of the universe is to become as full of life and mind as possible. Humans define what is good (as we are the most sophisticated level of intelligence) and if we can improve on ourselves, spread our influence everywhere, then this would be achieving a natural purpose.

Man becomes god, in effect - an omnipotent and omniscient presence in the universe. And this is also linked to a reversion to a more bottom-up view of complexity - the Santa Fe brand where top-down causality is again "just emergent" and so not terribly "real". The techno-triumphalist view is based on exponential progress that recognises no necessary upper limits, no global system constraints.

All very science fiction. In fact why not call it a scientific religion? Most scientists are really working as technologists and this is a creedo that endorses their actions. They are busy building that better world and to the extent this is natural, a purpose embedded in reality, it gives individual lives meaning to be an active participant in the process.

This is what gives their rhetoric a righteous tone (one to match other camps of religion). The purpose of science is to transform energy and resources into creating a vaster, more all-knowing, all-controlling, version of the human mind.

So you have at least three choices when it comes to finding the meaning of life. And scientist or theist, you can slot into any of these three I would say, even if some choices are more favoured.

1) bottom-up causality - claims simple and meaningless beginnings. Meaning is something that you then have to construct. But there are no limits, so what is natural is to head for infinite construction. The singularity for instance.

2) top-down causality - claims that something global, larger than ourselves, is in charge and enshrines purpose, meaning, goals. Which to a theist sounds like god. To attain a meaningful life, we have to rise up somehow to share that level of existence. There are also global limits as we should be entrained to that global purpose. We are not free to construct our own human meanings. And one 'obvious' way to move up to a higher level of meaning is to de-construct our material existence - to be poorer, humbler, less individually assertive and active, etc. By giving up our bottom-up approach, we become more purely aligned with the greater reality of the top-down, more purely aligned with where the meaning of reality exists.

3) a true systems view stresses that reality is self-organising and is the result of an equilbrium balance between bottom-up and top-down causality. So neither is privileged and meaning exists in the balance. A meaningful life is one that balances personal action against wider (typically social and ecological) constraints. Both individual competition and general co-operation are valued evenly, in systematic fashion.

What kind of "religion" might arise out of (3)?

Here there is a problem as there are two kinds of equilibrium systems - the open and the closed, the dynamic and the static. Do you "worship" the second law, the dissipation of entropy gradients, and so look forward to the heat death of the universe (and hence want to do all you can to accelerate this fate?). Or do you instead argue that the stable persistence of a regime is the key, and so a meaningful life is one that helps the human social system from crashing off the road, staying within its given ecological constraints?

Anyway, my points here are first, that it is too simple to identify science with bottom-up causality and religion with top-down (though there is some truth to that).

And second that science also seems strikingly like religion once people start talking about their futuristic (to be constructed!) idea of "heaven" - as in a singularity scenario, or a global consumer paradise, and other techno-utopias.

And third, if you progress to a systems perspective of the possible meaning of life, the answers could be surprising (worshipping the second law and the heat death?). But also still not easy to settle. A fundamental polarity still exists between maximising complexity and maximising simplicity - between keeping the human game going as long as humanly possible and crashing and burning in the name of accelerating the universe's heat death.

 

[DaveC426913]

Can you clarify this atheistic top-down causality?

 

[arunma]

Excellent post Arunma, I need to keep this as a reference for whenever this discussion comes up.

Thanks, I'm glad to help!

Brilliant. Let's see how long it takes before those are closed.

Well actually, I think there's some value in this thread. Most religion threads center around someone making a patently foolish argument against evolution or the Big Bang, based on cut 'n pastes from a creationist website. While the original poster here doesn't believe in evolution, at least he asked a more original question: why do scientists not mention God in our work? It's a fair question, since mention of God was pretty standard practice until at least the time of Laplace (Napoleon was surprised that he didn't do this). It's worth explaining to a nonscientist why we don't mention God in our papers, and why this has no bearing on the existence or nonexistence of God. To not respond to things like this would only add fuel to the fire started by people who make claims of scientists' secular conspiracies. It's important to explain why science has nothing to do with the question of theism. This helps us to keep that debate in the philosophical realm where it belongs, and prevents peoples' pet religious doctrines from being taught as science.

 

[waht]

Brilliant post Apeiron. I'm printing it to study in more detail tomorrow.

Science also has room for top-down causality - global constraints. And also for theories of meaning - semiotics being an example.

Does this imply that a top-down causality can be a local emergent process of a global bottom-up causality? If so I agree, If not how does science have room for top-down causality otherwise?

 

[apeiron]

Does this imply that a top-down causality can be a local emergent process of a global bottom-up causality? If so I agree, If not how does science have room for top-down causality otherwise?

The big picture would be that global constraints are emergent as a result of bottom-up actions (which is the "normal" story). But then what is different is to also say that the local actions are in turn also the result of emergence - shaped up by the very top-down constraints they are constructing.

This is a boot-strapping view of things. And it does argue that ALL top-down causality is emergent (so doing away with transcendant causes like gods or platonic realms of form).

But then more controversially, it wants to argue that ALL bottom-up action is also emergent (and so does not exist prior to the system itself - so there were not first a bunch of atoms in a void, and then they started to self-assemble into structures via the emergence of constraints.)

It is hard to find simple analogies for this complex view of causality. But you could think of the way the banks of a river (as global constraints) creates local whorls of turbulence (as local actions). Then these whorls over time also reshape the banks, leading to changes in the whorls thus being create. Each scale of the system is feeding back on the other, and the whole system is driven by the equilbrium that emerges.

 

[Evo]

I'm surprised the thread has been allowed to continue so long.

Ivan is busy and we usually let him handle threads here. I'm sure he will have a fit when he sees this thread. This would usually be exiled to the *philosophy* round file forum.

 

[apeiron]

Can you clarify this atheistic top-down causality?

Do you mean option 2 or 3 - top-down causality acting alone, or the system view of two kinds of causality in equilibrium interaction?

And what in particular is unclear?

As I replied to waht, a key to it being an "atheistic" worldview would be the presumption that all meaning, all global constraint, comes from within the system. Nothing has to be supplied from without by a mysterious external source.

The top-down causality is non-mysterious because we would be able to account for it as emergent bottom-up. This puts it squarely in the realm of scientific modelling. It arises where we can see it.

Likewise, we can then follow the story back the other way to see how what exists locally in the universe has to be so because of emergence. We don't have a puzzle over who made the first atom, or caused the first QM fluctuation. Local features this concrete must be made by global processes that are visible to us as well.

Of course, there is still a degree of mystery about the origins of things, but it is at least a lesser degree of mystery than we had before. Much more appears to be within the proper scope of science and atheism - we can track its story, it is not a mystery in which we must find answers based on faith.

 

[Pattonias]

I have really enjoyed reading everyone's thought and feelings on these matters in this thread. I am sure it won't last much longer so I just wanted to say that this is probably one of the best discussion on this subject I have read in a long time.

A truly mature discussion on a easily volatile topic.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Evo is right; normally threads like this get tossed into the round file. But I did poke my head in quickly today and thought this was a very productive discussion. Great job, everyone!

 

[xxChrisxx]

Why is what you quoted based on that?

They're not the only two options, but however many options you add, they boil down to just two.

I didn't know the word "believe" had only one definition.

Is there a reason you never EVER address the meat of a post? You know in your mind that I am right, so totally ignore the relevant parts of a post.

I thought this was going so well, we were having a decent discussion, and now that you've come up against a well thought out premise you simply make a one line comment that has nothing to do with the discussion to provoke someone into saying something that you can pick apart.

You don't tackle the comment rationally even when you do respond. Just like above you say "NO NO NO!" and make a flat disagreement with not even an remote attempt to respond to the content.

Your argument is also very poor.

You are aguing (basically) that if you aren't a theist you are an atheist. That's fair enough, as the two are mutually exclusive. NOONE can argue agsinst that beucase it's the very definition of the words.

However in the real world, you cannot put people into those two piles, as it doesn't accurately reflect their viewpoint. Also the meanings of agnosic and athist are different as belief and knowledge are different.

This is why your original statement of "agnostics should say athist as they are the same thing" is totally and utterly wrong.

End of the game really. You only seem to be able to come up with pathetically feeble responses designed to provoke so until you make an affort to be sensible about this, I see no reason to continue.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

...almost everyone.

 

[xxChrisxx]

...almost everyone.

Ivan it's bollocks, if you look at the way he reacts when confronted with a sound propsition he then makes a pedantic argument or a non relevant single line answer ignoring the point completely. This is why I never know if he's being serious and acutally believes what he's saying or is a troll.

 

[xxChrisxx]

The top-down approach implies a complete design like from blue prints, every building block, and sub-building block carefully crafted so that all the pieces work together as designed. It's like designing a skyscraper.

And science killed this was the case. The only remaining building scheme is a bottom-up approach.

You are assuming he plays by the rules (if he did exist). If we are to believe the fact he's all powerful he can do whatever he wants and can make things appear any way he wants.

That is from the action of all powerful Supreme Being, it follows there is lots of pointlessness.

Ever consider the fact that god is just a man with a very black sense of humour who's just having a laugh. The universe and all the crap in it is just his cosmological joke sitting on his mantelpiece.

I acutally quite like the idea that a god made the universe in a drunken stupor after a night out, and that's why it makes no sense.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I think the question in the op has been answered.