Here is a Q&A interview with me in the LA Times, to which I link only reluctantly, as somehow they managed to take a picture that makes me look like I’m wearing a bad toupee. And a halo! So that’s a mixed bag.
The interview was spurred by the recent Scientific American article on the arrow of time, and most of the questions are pretty straightforward queries about entropy and cosmology. But at the end we veer into matters theological:
Does God exist in a multiverse?
I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.
Nowadays people say, “Well, you certainly can’t explain the creation of the universe without invoking God,” and I want to say, “Don’t bet against it.”
I’m not really surprised that people bring up God when asking about cosmology; the subjects are related, like it or not. But I really do want to separate out the science from the religion, so in the context of an interview about physics I’m reluctant to talk about the existence of God, and I haven’t really perfected an answer when the subject comes up.
Anyone who reads the blog might be surprised to hear that I don’t want to give people advice about their religious beliefs — I do it all the time! But context is crucial. This is our blog, and we write about whatever we’re interested in, and nobody is forced to read it. Likewise, if I’m invited to speak or write specifically about the subject of religion, I’m happy to be perfectly honest about my views. But in a context where the explicit subject is supposed to be science, I would rather not bring up God at all; not because I’m reluctant to say what I believe, but because it gives a false impression of how scientists actually think about science. God just doesn’t come up in the everyday activities of a working cosmologist.
This was the second recent incident when I was prodded into talking about atheism when I would have liked to have stuck with physics. At my talk in St. Louis in front of the American Astronomical Society, I was introduced by John Huchra, the incoming AAS president. He had stumbled across “Why (Almost All) Cosmologists Are Atheists,” and insisted that I tell everyone why. So I gave a version of the above argument, presumably in an equally clumsy fashion: whether or not you choose to be religious, it’s a bad idea to base your belief on natural theology (reasoning towards God from evidence in the physical universe), as science has a way of swooping in and explaining things that had previously been judged inexplicable by purely natural means.
And I think that’s very true, but I think something stronger as well: that claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting. But it’s an argument I just don’t want to force on an audience that came for some science. After all, there are plenty of claims that I think are true, but I don’t feel an urgent need to insist on every single one of them in every imaginable venue.
For example: with the acquisition of a reliable low-post presence in the form of Elton Brand, the Sixers will be challenging for the Eastern Conference title this year and for the foreseeable future. Undoubtedly true, and an important fact about the universe that everyone should really appreciate, but not something I’ll be bringing up at my next physics seminar.
In an interview about physics, or a talk, or anything of that nature, the idea of God has no place. The answer is therefore very simple. Merely inform your interviewer that you are in a scientific context and therefore cannot make any comment about the existence of God. A good answer might sound like “It would be unscientific for me to comment on the existence of God.”
Preaching to them about your personal beliefs would only enforce, as commenters have pointed out, the image of scientists as a group of stodgy atheists, as well as your image as an atheist rather than a cosmologist. It would also scare off believers from listening to the scientific portion of your talk/interview.
As for the realms where Christian (or other religious) thought directly conflict with scientific evidence, such as evolution, it is more than fair to defend the scientific viewpoint. However, you must always be careful not only to separate science from religion, but science from belief in anything, including your own atheism. All too many arrogant scientists confuse their belief in the non-existence of God with scientific justification that God does not exist. Your atheistic beliefs are every bit as justified as their theistic ones.
Your comparison of the God question to the plum-pudding model is heinously illogical. One has been disproved by countless experiments and enormous amounts of evidence. Therefore it would not be preachy to tell a person that they are wrong. The other is a question outside of science, and you have no more justification to tell them they’re wrong than they do to tell you they’re right. It is not preachy, however, to ask them kindly to remove God from the scientific arena, where belief has no place.
So in a scientific setting, you can only take the position of a responsible scientist, which is that of an agnostic, one who will not let the idea of God interfere with cold, hard facts.
From the LA Times Letters to the Editor, July 6, 2008 on the interview:
————————————-
God and science
Re “Studying time’s mysteries, and the multiverse,” June 28
Sean M. Carroll states that “it used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.”
In fact, a thousand years ago, Ptolemy’s system of the universe was widely accepted in Christian Europe, Christian Byzantium and in the Muslim world. However mistaken that system was, it was based on observation and mathematics and did not involve God mechanically moving the moon through the sky.
The tendency to insert God into the gaps left by inadequate observation and faulty mathematics was introduced by scientists of the 17th and 18th centuries, not by religious teachers. We have been burdened by this misunderstanding ever since.
Traditional Christian doctrine has no problem with using science to explain how the phenomena of the universe work together. What it does teach, however, is that everything, even the most well-understood aspects of the world, exist because of the creative act of God, and that knowledge of this creative act derives from the self-revelation of God.
Marilyn Lundberg
Let’s face it, fellow earthlings, the anthropic principle, marshaling the immense improbability of a universe productive of intelligent life, has left a very big question mark in this arena, for which multiverse theories, part science, part philosophy, are, at best, a tentative, groping response.
Odder than the halo is the graph on the whiteboard. Looks as if it’s flowing in through your left ear and out to the right 😉
Andrew Zimmerman Jones of Andrew’s Physics Blog wants more physicists to speak out on the relationship between science and religion – but he also seems to want them to agree with him that science and religion are compatible.
Sean, I’m quite curious about one thing.
You write that you believe that “claims about God can be separated into two classes — (1) those that are meaningless, and (2) those that can be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims, and come up wanting.” Would you be willing to assert the same sentence if we replace “God” with “anything”, and remove the qualification that scientific claims come up wanting? In other words, would you assert that *all* statements are either evaluable by the standards of science, or are meaningless?
If you say yes, that seems like a very strong philosophical restriction on which statements can be considered meaningful — and indeed, one which might itself not pass its own test. If you say no, then why should statements about “God” have to adhere to a more rigorous standard?
Sorry, Sean, but that is a blatantly ridiculous assertion. There are many statements that fit neither category, whether referring to God or anything else. If I were to say “that piece of music is beautiful,” I don’t think I am making a meaningless statement, but equally the claim is not amenable to scientific evaluation.
Even your terms are sloppy here: which standard scientific criteria would you like to apply to theological statements? How about evaluating the argument, “the Bible is the undisputable word of God, and I know that to be true because it says so in the Bible.” You can dismiss it as a tautology if you like, but it is an entirely self-consistent theory. As such, it stands up rather better than much of modern physics.
“I’m not really surprised that people bring up God when asking about cosmology; the subjects are related, like it or not.”
Precisely. The concept of God is dominate in the ether regions of western thought. It is not necessarily the Judeo-Christian entity which inherited the throne of the roman state religions. To think that atheism or religion has a place in this ether region of origin is completely missing the point of western thought. It harkens back to the early greek thought of kosmos and logos. In the early days a politico invoked the state religion of the time and it is the same today if a politician wants to survive the voting process. People want to apply the same rules to the scientist. Who is to say that a final theory will not invoke a concept of order that the ancients say to look for. Is not science hierarchal? What will be the state religion 1000 years from now? I expect politicians will still be hugging and kissing babies at that time too.
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Sean, the picture is how God punish your view. Joke! 🙂
Mike M. wrote:
Must … resist … bait … cannot … afford … to – grrrwwwhhhngPaul wrote that about his only “bible” the old testament but how do you lump the new testament into self-claimed inerrancy and still maintain your “self consistency”?
Damn. My self-control isn’t what it used to be.
Anyway, Sean, thanks for the post. As a believer in God, I appreciate the diplomacy and agree with not betting against science. I also like reading your more forceful arguments here on the blog.
Because… the Bible is the undisputable word of God. It says so in the Bible. Any inconsistencies that you perceive are your failings, not the Bible’s, because… [repeat ad nauseam]
As it happens, I am not a believer in God. I just appreciate the neat self-consistency of this very simple argument, which seems to be what most fundamentalist theological arguments boil down to. It doesn’t mean that I think they are right.
Mike M.,
Ah, got it. My apologies. And yes, point taken.
What’s wrong with “I/We don’t know.”?
Anything else inserts your opinion, one way or the other.
I have to agree with Alex. He identifies a real philosophical problem in this portion of the original post:
Here we come to a problem. This insistence that claims about God are either able to “be judged by standard criteria for evaluating scientific claims,” or else they are “meaningless” is dubious at best. Either this insistence is an application of a general principle, or it is a special case. If it is the application if a general principle, (call this Case A), then it is unsound, since the principle is self-defeating.
If, OTOH, it is a special case then it is either an arbitrary claim, or it has a specific justification. If it is arbitrary, (call this Case B) then it is unsound just because it is arbitrary. If it has a specific justification (call this Case C), it may be sound, hypothetically, but I have no idea what special justification one would invoke that would justify this requirement. So, Case C is not yet justified, if indeed it is justifiable at all. Additionally, it encounters a problem in that it is unclear which “standard criteria” would be determinative. Those of zoology? Genetics? Geology? Chemistry? Theoretical physics? Experimental physics? Astronomy?
Case A is, sadly, quite common among scientists (like Richard Dawkins, for example), since the pedagogies of the natural sciences tend to reflect heavy positivist influences. The requirement that all meaningful claims be “scientifically testable” is self-refuting because, obviously, it is not scientifically testable. Anyone familiar with the history of positivism should be aware of this critique, and several others as well (e.g, the egocentric predicament, the problem of induction, the failure of the empiricist theory of concept formation). But many scientists, and most modern atheists, have absorbed the assumptions of positivism without being aware of the origin of their assumptions.
When Aristotle said that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” was he right?
There are problems with science getting into the atheisti business. One problem is that we are treading into philosophical ground we might prefer to stay away from. Another problem is that physics departments and the expensive tools used are ultimately financed by Joe taxpayer. About 1/2 to 2/3 of these people are at least nominally religious — Church on Sunday for forgiveness of sins and the other 6 days for sinning. We really don’t want to project too much of an anti-God bias, for this could lead to negative consequences. Many of these people vote conservative, and the last thing we need is to fan various flames which might lead to a pack of more no-nothings getting into office. Like it or not, these people are our neighbors.
Lawrence B. Crowell
The problem with most discussion is that it quickly drowns in nuance and detail.
My argument against monotheism is that the universal state of the absolute is basis, not apex(0, not 1), so the source of our consciousness(which is what people are really concerned about), as the spiritual absolute, would be the raw essence of awareness from which we rise and to which we fall, not an ideal of knowledge from which we fell and seek to return.
I tried this out on a Catholic priest who was a future in-law at the time, when he asked me if I believed in God. He crossed himself and turned away.
It’s the ‘yanking the rug out from under them’ argument.
You’ll forgive me if, like the priest, I do not regard that as a serious argument. It seems more like an incredible leap of faith.
When I am asked if I believe in God I often say yes. Of course in my mind I am thinking of God as a concept. On that basis I believe in both Bilbo Baggans and Chthulhu. If they persist in this conversation I will engage them. I am somewhat knowledgable in the Bible, and from various perspectives. From there I can have a bit of fun. It can be a lot of fun to tie some of these people into knots. The best part is when you can get them into a paradox. Nothing is proven particularly, you are just playing with them.
Lawrence B. Crowell
The positivists did appeal to a particular epistemology to claim that the concept of God was meaningless, but one does not need to be a positivist to have problems with the meaningfulness of at least some God concepts. Let us grant that we don’t know the criterion for meaningfulness in advance. Even so, don’t we have a right to expect that somebody who proposes a concept should be able to establish that their concept is not incoherent? Most of the theists I have encountered don’t put their God concept in any sort of philosophical context at all. At least if they were still Neoplatonics or Thomists, I’d more or less know what they’re talking about. So far as I can tell, the only guys with a straight answer are those for whom God is pretty much presented as a hugely powerful being with a bad temper, i.e. an especially impressive cosmic animal. That makes for a theology almost indistinguishable from science fiction, but at least it makes a modicum of sense. I’m not counting those for whom God is just the Universe and its Laws–I don’t have any problem with deus sive natura, I just don’t understand how calling reality God makes any difference.
John Knight,
I understand your point to mean a specific source or entity of origin, but it’s more a matter of direction; Bottom up process, vs. top down structure. The very concept of a particular entity is structural, while process is inherently emergent, in that we really don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going, only that it does exist and continues to evolve.
There is a political and economic corollary to this, in that politics also originated as a form of top down parental structure which reached its apogee with monarchy and we have since found it needs to be leavened with bottom up process, such as democracy, in order to be stable. The current economic model is precariously top heavy, even though its philosophical foundations are bottom up.
If we are to apply biological process to our current situation, humanity needs to find a way to transition from being top predator in a collapsing planetary eco-system to being the central nervous system of a planetary organism. If theological perspectives can be leveraged to help bring that about, I wouldn’t reject them out of philosophical myopia.
Cosmos is God: the Self-creator of all, is the Equator of All in all (Spacetime-Continuum). -Aiya-Oba.
There are problems with science getting into the atheisti business. One problem is that we are treading into philosophical ground we might prefer to stay away from.
If we agree to not tread that ground, would that mean that philosophers would stay out of science? Take for example Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, or anything that William Lane Craig has to say about time, infinity and the origin of the universe?
It is generally agreed, even by philosophers, that the single most convincing counterargument to the argument from design is Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Which, you may note, is a scientific theory,
Sean Carroll’s brand of atheism is fundamentally incoherent. On the one hand, he accepts the Darwinian evolutionary model for where he came from, believing that his brain is mere matter shaped by evolution. On the other hand, as a cosmologist, he expects the fundamental laws of the universe to “make sense” to him and be understandable by him. How could a capricious and contingent process like evolution give his material brain that ability? Why would the origin and 14 billion year history of the universe be understandable by a recently evolved human primate who has existed for just 0.0000014 percent of the history of the universe?
Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe assertion makes Sean’s atheistic naturalism even more untenable. If the natural world is fundamentally mathematical, why would a biological organism named Sean Carroll be able to do the math? Did the mathematical universe know he was coming and structure itself so that he could understand it after he just happened to evolve 14 billion years later? Who (or what) decided that the universe should be mathematical?
Sean writes: “science has a way of swooping in and explaining things that had previously been judged inexplicable by purely natural means.”
I would say that science (and Sean) has a steep hill to climb if it must be shown that this state of affairs all came about by “natural means.” In fact, science gives us evidence for things that are “unnatural.”
Reginald Selkirk,
Darwin’s theory, as a counter argument to the argument from design, is no longer convincing, thanks to cosmologists like Sean Carroll. (see my post #49)
The more cosmologists are able to explain the mathematical universe, the less convincing that counter argument becomes. Darwin’s theory just does not account for this incredible ability for humans to understand the universe.