A few years ago, the rage in popular science was chaos. People recognized that small differences can lead to really complex behaviors. A classic example is weather. We can describe the weather. We can predict trends for a few days. We really cannot predict the weather in detail, especially for say a month in advance. (There are some things that we can rule out, such as it probably will not snow here in Houston in July.) The weather has inherently chaotic aspects to it. A lot of our lives feel like chaos reigns. The next wave was “complexity”. Does your life seem complex? The idea in science with this was that complex materials can spontaneously organize.
Could this be why the universe is the way it is? Could it be that inherent in the Big Bang were characteristics that caused stars and galaxies to form? Was it self-organization that caused planets to form, some of which would develop life? Perhaps some of those which had life would, by some sort of self-organizing processes, develop complex life. Maybe some of these would develop advanced life, though undoubtedly most wouldn’t. Perhaps purely accidentally some of the advanced lifeforms were favored enough to become intelligent, self-aware forms. If the planet were really fortunate, it may have the resources to support a highly technological society. Perhaps some of the favored few might actually have developed such a society. Maybe a few of these planets with technological societies might be fortunate enough to be located where they could look out through the night and get a glimpse at the reaches beyond their region of their galaxy and see galaxies beyond. Perhaps such societies might have individuals who wonder how they came to be and would study their origin and why they are there. Of course, somewhere along their course to this point, many of the planets probably would have been hit by an asteroid that would have wiped out their civilization. Perhaps their tectonic system died out in some of them and they became permanent ice balls or fire balls.
Perhaps favorable accidents and self-organizing process could form what we see in our universe or perhaps the processes were guided by a mind. Which is more reasonable? Which is more probable? We all use our ideas of probability to guide our actions. We do not know the future, so we make decisions about how to procced based on what we think it will probably look like. We have different ideas about what is more probable and what is more risky. We have different understandings about what constitutes an acceptable risk.
Before we look at what best explanations for the natural universe are, I want to firm up some concepts of probability. Imagine a friend cuts a deck of cards, revealing the king of diamonds. He asks you, “what is the probability that I got the king of diamonds?” Perhaps, you might say, “pretty low”. If you are more quantitatively oriented, you might say, “1 in 52 or about a 2% chance.” You would be wrong. You are looking at the king of diamonds. The chance is 100%. Probability really involves things that are uncertain. If we already see the results, they are what they are. In a sense, the universe is like that. It is what it is.
If your friend had said, before cutting, what is the probability of getting the king of diamonds, the answer might have been 2%. Might have been? Yes, 2% assumes that the card deck has 52 equally probable options. What if half the cards are king of diamonds? Imagine that your friend took the deck of 52 cards and began revealing them one by one and they looked like this……
All four aces, followed by all 4 kings, all 4 queens and so forth. Now, such an arrangement is one possible outcome of a totally random shuffling of a deck of cards. Do you believe that that is how these cards came to be in the order seen here? Why not?
Even though the results are already revealed, we would be wise to doubt pure chance for this. We might not be able to prove it, but it is more reasonable to decide that something besides random processes were at work. I want to point out that the order of the cards in the image is not perfectly ordered. The first four cards are the ace of diamonds, the ace of hearts, the ace of spades, and the ace of clubs. If it were ordered more strictly, the next cards would be the king of diamonds, the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the king of clubs. However, that is not the order that the kings are in nor the queens, yet we can easily see order. That demonstrates that we do not need perfect order to be able to see a clear pattern. It does help to look for it though.
We will look at nature in coming posts in this category. We will consider whether we are in the scenario where the cards are random or whether we are in the case where they are ordered. We will consider whether self-organization is likely or whether a mind is called for. Nature does not necessarily give an absolute proof for a mind, any more than it would be impossible to deal out a deck of cards like the example in the figure. For some, there could be no adequate proof. If a mind is the best explanation, then we can think about what we can learn about that mind from nature.
What if the cards you had looked like this?
What do you think the next two cards are? How confident are you? This requires the ability to extrapolate. They say that there are two kinds of people: those who can extrapolate based on incomplete data.
In this case, I suggest that this photo demonstrates what faith based on evidence means. We don’t know what is in the future. Blind faith needs no evidence. Blind faith might bet that the next 2 cards are threes. Faith based on evidence can say that we trust the God who has been faithful in the past will continue to be so despite the fact that the cards are covered.
What should we look for in nature? Complex patterns can be beautiful and ordered. Watch a movie of the Mandelbrot set to appreciate this. This function based on complex numbers never repeats and is complexly beautiful. The fact that nature is complex does not prove that a mind is behind it. The fact that life is complex does not prove that a mind is behind it. Early scientists such as Isaac Newton saw just the opposite. They saw an elegance in the heavens that suggested a mind. Writing the introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy“, Roger Cotes wrote,
“Therefore we may now more nearly behold the beauties of Nature, and entertain ourselves with the delightful contemplation; and, which is the best and most valuable fruit of philosophy, be thence incited the more profoundly to reverence and adore the great Maker and Lord of all. He must be blind who from the most wise and excellent contrivances of things cannot see the infinite Wisdom and Goodness of their Almighty Creator, and he must be mad and senseless who refuses to acknowledge them.”
Elegance and beauty are definitely consistent with a mind. Nature abounds in beauty. It is over-the-top extravagant. This has certainly pointed people to a creator for millennia. Looking back at the card example, when would you, based on your experience, start to think that the deck might be rigged? I might wonder with the first ace. With the second ace, I would be very suspicious. With the third ace, I am convinced. Our mind discerns a pattern that in our experience with card distributions and how they arise, suggests a non-random distribution. We could perhaps generate a card order such as the one with all the card arranged by their value by a mechanical process. However, it would be unlikely that such a process would form without knowing that the end product would group all of the cards with aces together followed by kings together, etc. When we look for a mind behind nature, part of that is trying to discern that the order that we find was put there for a purpose. Unguided processes do not know what they are trying to build. It is not surprising that the claim of a mind behind nature is at times controversial. We cannot unplay nature and then replay it to see what the results would be. We must look for the most reasonable conclusion. This is commonly called Abductive reasoning. Wikipedia defines this as a form of logical inference which starts with an observation or set of observations and then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation for the observations. This is a theme through most of the topics that I am investigating on this site.
In nature, we cannot rerun the experiment of creation to look for different outcomes and if the mind happens to be the Christian God, then we certainly cannot dictate the rules that He uses. For instance, we cannot set up an experiment where we demand that he provide a miracle. He can simply decide not to play. We cannot use probabilities in the sense of predicting an outcome because the cards have already been played. The universe is here.
If we can set of a hypothesis that would demand a mind to have been required, then we can evaluate with evidence. For instance, we can make a hypothesis that this universe is designed such that one of its explicit purposes is to have advanced lifeforms that can know the creator, then we can look at creation and compare that to random processes, perhaps with self-organization tendencies. While we cannot strictly use probabilities, in some cases we can look at what type of precision is required for the parameters that set up the existence to fit the hypothesis. It may be subjective but at some point, it should be more reasonable to assume the hypothesis is true than the alternatives.
Melissa Travis writes about the “maker thesis” that embodies this. The idea that life demands a designer is controversial but many are convinced it demonstrates “intelligent design”. Marcos Eberlin strings together many parts of nature that he says show evidence of “foresight”where the end product had to be in view in order to generate the end. The scientists at Reasons to Believe have developed a model that they propose to test by the trend of future scientific discoveries.
If a mind created the natural processes and directed them with one purpose being to create advanced life, then what would be required? It might not demand that it look exactly like our universe, but there are parts in our universe that are essential. If that universe were designed to have develop advanced life that would be capable of engaging in a relationship with the creator, then even more characteristics would be important.
For instance, advanced life would require a long-lived stable life source such as the sun. The advanced life would need to be in a place such as a rocky planet. The planet needs to be stable for a long, long time as the planet is prepared for life.
The chemistry of the elements that we have really limits the options for what comprise that life. In fact, carbon seems to have unique properties suggesting that it is really the only option on which to base life in the physics that we have. A planet with life will need the right amount of carbon. It will need oxygen. It will need the right amount of water. It will need to have that water in solid, liquid and gaseous states. It would need the right amount of more subtle elements such as chromium and lithium. The requirements go on and on. In coming posts we will consider some of these. I really would recommend Hugh Ross’ book, The Improbable Planet, where he describes many requirements and how they came to be. What we see is that the universe is extremely finely tuned to allow stars and planets to exist. We find ourselves in just the right type of galaxy, on a planet that circles just the right type of star. The planet is just the right distance with just the right type of other planets beyond it. It has just the right type of composition. Its history over and over has developed in ways that protected it such that life could be protected. It becomes very reasonable to consider it not a random occurrence, but a case like the deck of cards arranged in a very deliberate manner.
Stay tuned as we will look at evidence.
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