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| The No-Design
Hypothesis INTRODUCTION Some people, and not
at least some scientists, deny every possible fundamental, meaningfull
organization of the Universe. Hence an Evolution hypothesis, including
the Noosphere hypothesis, seems without any argument. I believe
in the intrinsic chaotic structurelessness of the universe. The illusion
of an order only exists in our brain, and this misconception is possible
by the fact that our time concept is too short to be realistic, as if some
one should conclude from snapshots of a collapsing building, that it is
a stable construction. Furthermore, the organization of the universe is
so bad that it is a veritable shame for the Designer. Everything jumps
and bumps against and through each other, decays, explodes, and more of
that silly stuff. There is not the least hint towards any "convergence".
It's a Universe without design, without Designer. Theories including
that of Teilhard seem to me a clumsy attempt for recuperation, most probably
well intended, but also driven by the reputed frustration that science
is religion's churchyard. (Chris Impens 1/02) DEFINITION
The No-Design
Hypothesis
states that there is no fundamental design, no aim, no goal,
no progressive tendency, no meaning in the Universe. All theories that
seem to recognize such a structure are misconceptions, most probably projected
out of our anxious and immature psychological desire to be protected and
supported by such an strong and reliable structure, that in most of theories
is anthropocentric. Religion, and the
"religious" sciences, as Teilhard's Evolutionary theory, are a compensation
for people that don't have the real humanism, in science and arts. As said
Goethe: "Wer Wissenschaft
und Kunst besitzt, der hat auch Religion. Wer von den beiden
keinen hat, der habe Religion." (He, who possesses
Science and Arts, possesses Religion too, But who lacks
both, better should have Religion.) ARGUMENTS The No-Design
Hypothesis finds a convinced defender in the person of Steven
Weinberg, Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Winner
of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics. I have been
asked to comment on whether the universe shows signs of having been designed.[1]
I don't see how it's possible to talk about this without having at least
some vague idea of what a designer would be like. We need a Designer
to explain Universe Any possible
universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even
a universe that is completely chaotic, without any laws or regularities
at all, could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot. The question that
seems to me to be worth answering, and perhaps not impossible to answer,
is whether the universe shows signs of having been designed by a deity more or less like those of traditional monotheistic religions --not necessarily
a figure from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but at least some sort
of personality, some intelligence, who created the universe and has some
special concern with life, in particular with human life. I expect that
this is not the idea of a designer held by many here. You may tell me that
you are thinking of something much more abstract, some cosmic spirit of
order and harmony, as Einstein did. You are certainly free to think that
way, but then I don't know why you use words like "designer" or "God,"
except perhaps as a form of protective coloration. It used to be obvious
that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could
account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the
wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had
a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in
terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know
the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of
the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to
understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain
one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even
though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about
the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond
the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over
billions of years. There do not seem
to be any exceptions to this natural order, any miracles. I have the impression
that these days most theologians are embarrassed by talk of miracles, but
the great monotheistic faiths are founded on miracle stories --the burning
bush, the empty tomb, an angel dictating the Koran to Mohammed-- and some
of these faiths teach that miracles continue at the present day. The evidence
for all these miracles seems to me to be considerably weaker than the evidence
for cold fusion, and I don't believe in cold fusion. Above all, today we
understand that even human beings are the result of natural selection acting
over millions of years of breeding and eating. The fundamental Laws
show the hand of God I'd guess
that if we were to see the hand of the designer anywhere, it would be in
the fundamental principles, the final laws of nature, the book of rules
that govern all natural phenomena. We don't know the final laws yet, but
as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite
without any special role for life. There is no life force. As Richard Feynman
has said, when you look at the universe and understand its laws, "the theory
that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for
good and evil seems inadequate." True, when quantum
mechanics was new, some physicists thought that it put humans back into
the picture, because the principles of quantum mechanics tell us how to
calculate the probabilities of various results that might be found by a
human observer. But, starting with the work of Hugh Everett forty years
ago, the tendency of physicists who think deeply about these things has
been to reformulate quantum mechanics in an entirely objective way, with
observers treated just like everything else. I don't know if this program
has been completely successful yet, but I think it will be. I have to admit that,
even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go, when we have
a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the
world, because we will still be left with the question "why?" Why this
theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described
by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present
physics that is likely to survive intact in any future theory, but there
is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine
a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be
an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate. But religious theories
of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by
a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking
about? If you do mean something definite by "God" or "design," if for instance
you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical,
then you still must confront the question "why?" A religion may assert
that the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other
sort of God, and it may offer evidence for this belief, but it cannot explain
why this should be so. In this respect,
it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly
satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever be, because
although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are
what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be
able to explain why they are not slightly different. For instance, no one
has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum
mechanics that is only slightly different. Once you start trying to make
small changes in quantum mechanics, you get into theories with negative
probabilities or other logical absurdities. When you combine quantum mechanics
with relativity you increase its logical fragility. You find that unless
you arrange the theory in just the right way you get nonsense, like effects
preceding causes, or infinite probabilities. Religious theories, on the
other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the
invention of deities of any conceivable sort. Now, it doesn't settle
the matter for me to say that we cannot see the hand of a designer in what
we know about the fundamental principles of science. It might be that,
although these principles do not refer explicitly to life, much less human
life, they are nevertheless craftily designed to bring it about. The so-called fine-tuned
constants of nature: (1) The carbon
story Some physicists
have argued that certain constants of nature have values that seem to have
been mysteriously fine-tuned to just the values that allow for the possibility
of life, in a way that could only be explained by the intervention of a
designer with some special concern for life. I am not impressed with these
supposed instances of fine-tuning. For instance, one of the most frequently
quoted examples of fine-tuning has to do with a property of the nucleus
of the carbon atom. The matter left over from the first few minutes of
the universe was almost entirely hydrogen and helium, with virtually none
of the heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that seem to
be necessary for life. The heavy elements that we find on earth were built
up hundreds of millions of years later in a first generation of stars,
and then spewed out into the interstellar gas out of which our solar system
eventually formed. The first step in
the sequence of nuclear reactions that created the heavy elements in early
stars is usually the formation of a carbon nucleus out of three helium
nuclei. There is a negligible chance of producing a carbon nucleus in its
normal state (the state of lowest energy) in collisions of three helium
nuclei, but it would be possible to produce appreciable amounts of carbon
in stars if the carbon nucleus could exist in a radioactive state with
an energy roughly 7 million electron volts (MeV) above the energy of the
normal state, matching the energy of three helium nuclei, but (for reasons
I'll come to presently) not more than 7.7 MeV above the normal state. This radioactive
state of a carbon nucleus could be easily formed in stars from three helium
nuclei. After that, there would be no problem in producing ordinary carbon;
the carbon nucleus in its radioactive state would spontaneously emit light
and turn into carbon in its normal nonradioactive state, the state found
on earth. The critical point in producing carbon is the existence of a
radioactive state that can be produced in collisions of three helium nuclei. In fact, the carbon
nucleus is known experimentally to have just such a radioactive state,
with an energy 7.65 MeV above the normal state. At first sight this may
seem like a pretty close call; the energy of this radioactive state of
carbon misses being too high to allow the formation of carbon (and hence
of us) by only 0.05 MeV, which is less than one percent of 7.65 MeV. It
may appear that the constants of nature on which the properties of all
nuclei depend have been carefully fine-tuned to make life possible. Looked at more closely,
the fine-tuning of the constants of nature here does not seem so fine.
We have to consider the reason why the formation of carbon in stars requires
the existence of a radioactive state of carbon with an energy not more
than 7.7 MeV above the energy of the normal state. The reason is that the
carbon nuclei in this state are actually formed in a two-step process:
first, two helium nuclei combine to form the unstable nucleus of a beryllium
isotope, beryllium 8, which occasionally, before it falls apart, captures
another helium nucleus, forming a carbon nucleus in its radioactive state,
which then decays into normal carbon. The total energy of the beryllium
8 nucleus and a helium nucleus at rest is 7.4 MeV above the energy of the
normal state of the carbon nucleus; so if the energy of the radioactive
state of carbon were more than 7.7 MeV it could only be formed in a collision
of a helium nucleus and a beryllium 8 nucleus if the energy of motion of
these two nuclei were at least 0.3 MeV --***an energy which is extremely
unlikely at the temperatures found in stars. Thus the crucial
thing that affects the production of carbon in stars is not the 7.65 MeV
energy of the radioactive state of carbon above its normal state, but the
0.25 MeV energy of the radioactive state, an unstable composite of a beryllium
8 nucleus and a helium nucleus, above the energy of those nuclei at rest.[2]
This energy misses being too high for the production of carbon by a fractional
amount of 0.05 MeV/0.25 MeV, or 20 percent, which is not such a close call
after all. (2) The energy density
of space This conclusion
about the lessons to be learned from carbon synthesis is somewhat controversial.
In any case, there is one constant whose value does seem remarkably well
adjusted in our favor. It is the energy density of empty space, also known
as the cosmological constant. It could have any value, but from first principles
one would guess that this constant should be very large, and could be positive
or negative. If large and positive, the cosmological constant would act
as a repulsive force that increases with distance, a force that would prevent
matter from clumping together in the early universe, the process that was
the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. If
large and negative the cosmological constant would act as an attractive
force increasing with distance, a force that would almost immediately reverse
the expansion of the universe and cause it to recollapse, leaving no time
for the evolution of life. In fact, astronomical observations show that
the cosmological constant is quite small, very much smaller than would
have been guessed from first principles. It is still too early
to tell whether there is some fundamental principle that can explain why
the cosmological constant must be this small. But even if there is no such
principle, recent developments in cosmology offer the possibility of an
explanation of why the measured values of the cosmological constant and
other physical constants are favorable for the appearance of intelligent
life. According to the "chaotic inflation" theories of André Linde
and others, the expanding cloud of billions of galaxies that we call the
big bang may be just one fragment of a much larger universe in which big
bangs go off all the time, each one with different values for the fundamental
constants. In any such picture,
in which the universe contains many parts with different values for what
we call the constants of nature, there would be no difficulty in understanding
why these constants take values favorable to intelligent life. There would
be a vast number of big bangs in which the constants of nature take values
unfavorable for life, and many fewer where life is possible. You don't
have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the
parts of the universe where life is possible: in all the other parts of
the universe there is no one to raise the question.[3] If any theory of
this general type turns out to be correct, then to conclude that the constants
of nature have been fine-tuned by a benevolent designer would be like saying,
"Isn't it wonderful that God put us here on earth, where there's water
and air and the surface gravity and temperature are so comfortable, rather
than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto?" Where else in the solar
system other than on earth could we have evolved? The anthropic trap Reasoning
like this is called "anthropic." Sometimes it just amounts to an assertion
that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist, without
further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than mystical mumbo
jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number of worlds in
which some constants take different values, then the anthropic explanation
of why in our world they take values favorable for life is just common
sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury or
Pluto. The actual value of the cosmological constant, recently measured
by observations of the motion of distant supernovas, is about what you
would expect from this sort of argument: it is just about small enough
so that it does not interfere much with the formation of galaxies. But
we don't yet know enough about physics to tell whether there are different
parts of the universe in which what are usually called the constants of
physics really do take different values. This is not a hopeless question;
we will be able to answer it when we know more about the quantum theory
of gravitation than we do now. It would be evidence
for a benevolent designer if life were better than could be expected on
other grounds. To judge this, we should keep in mind that a certain capacity
for pleasure would readily have evolved through natural selection, as an
incentive to animals who need to eat and breed in order to pass on their
genes. It may not be likely that natural selection on any one planet would
produce animals who are fortunate enough to have the leisure and the ability
to do science and think abstractly, but our sample of what is produced
by evolution is very biased, by the fact that it is only in these fortunate
cases that there is anyone thinking about cosmic design. Astronomers call
this a selection effect. The universe is very
large, and perhaps infinite, so it should be no surprise that, among the
enormous number of planets that may support only unintelligent life and
the still vaster number that cannot support life at all, there is some
tiny fraction on which there are living beings who are capable of thinking
about the universe, as we are doing here. A journalist who has been assigned
to interview lottery winners may come to feel that some special providence
has been at work on their behalf, but he should keep in mind the much larger
number of lottery players whom he is not interviewing because they haven't
won anything. Thus, to judge whether our lives show evidence for a benevolent
designer, we have not only to ask whether life is better than would be
expected in any case from what we know about natural selection, but we
need also to take into account the bias introduced by the fact that it
is we who are thinking about the problem. God made life beautiful This is
a question that you all will have to answer for yourselves. Being a physicist
is no help with questions like this, so I have to speak from my own experience.
My life has been remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile
of human happiness, but even so, I have seen a mother die painfully of
cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores
of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent
designer are pretty well hidden. The prevalence
of evil and misery has always bothered those who believe in a benevolent
and omnipotent God. Sometimes God is excused by pointing to the need for
free
will. Milton gives God this argument in Paradise Lost: I formed them free,
and free they must remain Till they enthral themselves: I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained
Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall. It seems a bit unfair
to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free
will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account
for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors? I don't need to argue
here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed,
but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the
hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent
is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement
that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior
from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels
and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children's lives
at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns
us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a
nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according
to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced
of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what
other standards can we use? The good moral influence
of religion... The prestige
of religion seems today to derive from what people take to be its moral
influence, rather than from what they may think has been its success
in accounting for what we see in nature. Conversely, I have to admit that,
although I really don't believe in a cosmic designer, the reason that I
am taking the trouble to argue about it is that I think that on balance
the moral influence of religion has been awful. This is much too
big a question to be settled here. On one side, I could point out endless
examples of the harm done by religious enthusiasm, through a long history
of pogroms, crusades, and jihads. In our own century it was a Muslim zealot
who killed Sadat, a Jewish zealot who killed Rabin, and a Hindu zealot
who killed Gandhi. No one would say that Hitler was a Christian zealot,
but it is hard to imagine Nazism taking the form it did without the foundation
provided by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. ... e.g. the suppression
of slavery On the other
side, many admirers of religion would set countless examples of the good
done by religion. For instance, in his recent book Imagined Worlds, the
distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson has emphasized the role of religious
belief in the suppression of slavery. I'd like to comment briefly on this
point, not to try to prove anything with one example but just to illustrate
what I think about the moral influence of religion. It is certainly true
that the campaign against slavery and the slave trade was greatly strengthened
by devout Christians, including the Evangelical layman William Wilberforce
in England and the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in America.
But Christianity, like other great world religions, lived comfortably with
slavery for many centuries, and slavery was endorsed in the New Testament.
So what was different for anti-slavery Christians like Wilberforce and
Channing? There had been no discovery of new sacred scriptures, and neither
Wilberforce nor Channing claimed to have received any supernatural revelations.
Rather, the eighteenth century had seen a widespread increase in rationality
and humanitarianism that led others --for instance, Adam Smith, Jeremy
Bentham, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan-- also to oppose slavery, on grounds
having nothing to do with religion. Lord Mansfield, the author of the decision
in Somersett's Case, which ended slavery in England (though not its colonies),
was no more than conventionally religious, and his decision did not mention
religious arguments. Although Wilberforce was the instigator of the campaign
against the slave trade in the 1790s, this movement had essential support
from many in Parliament like Fox and Pitt, who were not known for their
piety. As far as I can tell, the moral tone of religion benefited more
from the spirit of the times than the spirit of the times benefited from
religion. Where religion did
make a difference, it was more in support of slavery than in opposition
to it. Arguments from scripture were used in Parliament to defend the slave
trade. Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a
slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that
allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham.
Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft
heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery,
because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any
sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery
was God's will. With or without religion,
good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people
to do evil --that takes religion. Conclusion In an e-mail
message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I
learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue
between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between
science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the
great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for
intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for
them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment. [1]
This article is based on a talk given in April 1999 at the Conference on
Cosmic Design of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
in Washington, D.C. [2]
This was pointed out in a 1989 paper by M. Livio, D. Hollowell, A. Weiss,
and J.W. Truran ("The anthropic significance of the existence of an excited
state of 12C," Nature, Vol. 340, No. 6231, July 27, 1989). They did the
calculation quoted here of the 7.7 MeV maximum energy of the radioactive
state of carbon, above which little carbon is formed in stars. [3]
The same conclusion may be reached in a more subtle way when quantum mechanics
is applied to the whole universe. Through a reinterpretation of earlier
work by Stephen Hawking, Sidney Coleman has shown how quantum mechanical
effects can lead to a split of the history of the universe (more precisely,
in what is called the wave function of the universe) into a huge number
of separate possibilities, each one corresponding to a different set of
fundamental constants. See Sidney Coleman, "Black Holes as Red Herrings:
Topological fluctuations and the loss of quantum coherence," Nuclear Physics,
Vol. B307 (1988), p. 867.
The
original article of Steven Weinberg can be found on several pages on the
Web, including: PhyslinkNew
York UniversityWestern
Michigan University and many more. |