God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (18 page)

James outlines how monotheism developed as a series of eight meme “mutations”:
⁸⁴

• Specialist god to general-purpose god
  
• Polytheism to monotheism
  
• Tolerance of other gods to intolerance
  
• Local gods to global gods
  
• Physical (“same stuff as us”) to abstract
  
• Pragmatic/natural ethics to god-given rules
  
• Unlikable to kind
  
• Sexual to asexual
  

He explains:

In primitive animism, each spirit has a very specific ecological niche—the bear spirit does bear stuff, and the cloud spirit does weather stuff, and the two don't compete for survival. They “live” in separate ecological niches. But…as time passed, the multitude of spirits narrowed down to fewer gods, and then to just a few gods. At the same time, these gods became more general, and therein lies the problem: At some point, their “ecological niches” started to overlap, and they started competing with one another for attention. Just as in nature, if two gods serve the same purpose, it's unlikely that both will survive.”
⁸⁵

James provides a good answer to what he calls “the Atheist paradox.” He quotes satirist Becky Garrison as asking, “If religion were a truly useless and destructive mechanism with no redemptive qualities whatsoever, then wouldn't it be extinct by now?”
⁸⁶
No, because it's a virus.

Additionally, James discusses several facts about evolution, both genetic and memetic, that Garrison misunderstands: (1) evolution works on individuals, not groups, so what benefits an individual (or its DNA) can often be harmful to the group; (2) parasites can hijack mechanisms that evolved for a
different purpose; (3) alien genes or memes can invade other species and take them over; (4) genes and memes can have both good and bad benefit so that the bad can survive as long as it is outweighed by the good.
⁸⁷

So we see that not only did Darwin give us an explanation of the development and variety of life on Earth, displacing the old religious myths, but Darwinism also helps us to understand the evolution of those myths. Furthermore, memetic evolution is far faster than genetic evolution, which must rely on random mutations. Memetic evolution is also Lamarckian, so that acquired characteristics are passed on, again a speedy process.

If the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and energy—often with tragic results.

—Sam Harris
¹

PUTTING HEAT TO WORK

I
n this chapter and the next two, we will spend some time developing the worldview that is presented to us by modern physics and cosmology. We will see how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science gradually has filled in the gaps in natural knowledge that once seemed to provide a convincing scientific case for a creator. We will begin with thermodynamics.

In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution produced machines that took over much of the physical burdens that were previously performed by humans and animals. These machines operated according to Newton's laws of mechanics, which could be used to predict their behavior, thus greatly aiding in their design. Machines required energy to operate. Although Newton had not used the concept, his equations could be used to derive the fact that a certain quantity called energy was conserved in a closed system. If you wanted a machine to do a given amount of work, such as lift a certain mass a given height, then you needed to provide at least as much energy equal to the work you wanted done. In physics, the definition of work is useful energy.

In practice, you need to put more energy in than the work you get out because some energy is always irretrievably lost as friction. Engineers could see that friction produces heat, and it was proposed that heat is a form of energy. A new science developed called
thermodynamics
to handle phenomena involving heat. Heat is also energy, but not all of it is useful. The
first law of thermodynamics
extended the principle of energy conservation to processes involving heat. It said that the change in the internal energy of a system must equal the work done by the system minus the heat produced, or, equivalently, plus the heat added to the system. These quantities can be positive or negative. For example, with a refrigerator or air conditioner, the work done by a system and the heat added to a system are negative; that is, work comes in and heat goes out.

It was observed that it seemed impossible to build a perfect heat engine, one that converted all the input heat into work. It also seemed impossible to build a perfect refrigerator that just lowered the temperature of a system without doing any work on the system. The latter also implied that heat always flows from a hotter body to a colder one in the absence of work. Although allowed by the first law of thermodynamics, since energy is still conserved, some heat processes such as this were irreversible. This suggested a second law of thermodynamics. There are several versions that are all equivalent: you cannot build a perfect heat engine; you cannot build a perfect refrigerator; heat always flows from high to low temperature.

For example, suppose two blocks of lead are inside a rigid, insulated box that does not allow any heat or work in or out. One block is at a higher temperature than the other. When you bring them in contact, heat will flow from the higher to the lower temperature body. Eventually the two will reach an equilibrium temperature in between the two initial temperatures.

Although allowed by energy conservation, you will never see the cooler body transferring heat to the hotter one, lowering its temperature further and raising the temperature of the hotter body even more without doing work. That would be a perfect refrigerator and we could use it to build a perfect heat engine. A perfect heat engine would be a perpetual motion machine. The second law of thermodynamics forbids these.

The second law was shown to be equivalent to the statement that a certain
mathematical quantity called
entropy
must remain constant or increase in time in a closed system. That is, the entropy of a closed system can never decrease. This accounts for the fact that some processes are apparently irreversible. The reverse process would violate the second law. Entropy was seen to be a measure of the disorder of a system, which when left alone eventually decays and runs down. For example, when a living organism dies, it is no longer able to input energy and eventually dissolves back into dust.

Being a closed system, the second law implies that the universe will eventually run down in what is called “heat death.” However, that will not happen for many trillions of years.

THERMOTHEOLOGY

As Danish historian Helge S. Kragh describes in her unique study,
Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology
, published in 2008, ancient thinkers debated whether the universe was eternal or had a finite lifetime.
²
Aristotle thought it was eternal while Stoic philosophers argued that the evidence for irreversible decay is all around us. Around 320 BCE, the philosopher Zeno of Citrium remarked that if Earth had always existed, erosion would have flattened out all the mountains.
³
Of course, we now know that Earth did not always exist; rather, it formed 4.5 billion years ago and, furthermore, mountains are continually regenerated by the collisions of tectonic plates.

Early Christian thinkers such as John Philoponus (died 570) systematically argued against the eternity of the world (read “universe”) since it challenged the doctrine of the creation. During the scientific revolution it was widely believed that the universe was slowly deteriorating. This was consistent with theological notions. For example, Martin Luther said, “The world degenerates and grows worse and worse every day…[and] will perish shortly.”
⁴

The mechanical theory of heat and work has been part of the ideological debate between science and religion since the 1840s. The concept of energy was regarded as evidence for a spirit world in opposition to materialism. Both the first and second laws of thermodynamics provided good arguments for the existence of a creator until the twentieth century. The first law comes in when
you ask where the energy that the universe currently contains came from in the first place. The second law comes in when you ask where the order of the universe came from in the first place.

If the universe came from nothing, it should have zero energy. Thus, the argument goes, the first law of thermodynamics must have been violated at the creation of the universe. The creation therefore appears to have been a miracle.

Likewise, if the entropy of the universe is continually increasing with time, then it had to be lower in the past. That is, the universe must have begun from a state of high order, implying it could not have grown out of chaos but must have been created with high initial order. So, the second law of thermodynamics was also apparently violated by a miraculous creation.

These two scientific arguments for the existence of a creator were good ones at one time because they were based on the best empirical knowledge of the day and could not be defeated by reason alone—only by further empirical knowledge. That was to come, as we will see in
chapter 7
.

THE WAVE NATURE OF LIGHT

Besides thermodynamics, another important development in nineteenth-century physics concerned the nature of light and the more general, related notions of waves and fields. This had implications for the common belief found among theologians and nontheistic spiritualists that the universe is one irreducible totality in which human consciousness plays a role. This profound notion will be discussed in
chapter 6
.

In 1803, English physicist and all-around genius Thomas Young (died 1829) demonstrated that light had the properties of a wave. At that time, the conventional view was that light was composed of “corpuscles,” as proposed by Newton. While Newton's contemporary, Dutch mathematician and scientist Christiaan Huygens (died 1695), had proposed a wave theory of light back in 1678, Newton's corpuscular theory held sway until Young demonstrated otherwise.

Young had used a ripple tank to demonstrate the interference of water
waves. He did several experiments with light that showed wave effects. Today, the classic experiment to demonstrate the wave nature of light is called
Young's double slit
, although Young did not perform the experiment in the same way. In the double slit experiment, an opaque plate with two thin slits is illuminated by a point source of light. The two beams that emerge produce an interference pattern on a screen behind the plate. Now that lasers are available to provide an intense beam of monochromatic light, this is a simple classroom demonstration.

FIELDS

The nature of light is related to the concept of the field. Fields play an important role in the interplay between spirituality and science, or holism and atomism. A particle is confined to a point, or at least to a small region, in space and is what we call “local.” Atomism reduces all of matter to localized particles.
⁵
A field covers all of space and, although modern quantum field theory can be interpreted as “reducing” everything to fields (more on this later), the notion of the field is also taken by modern quantum spiritualists to exemplify that the universe is one undifferentiated whole. For example, the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, used the Grand Unified Field proposed by physicists in the 1970s to claim a scientific basis for his notion of a cosmic consciousness into which the human mind can tune. The Grand Unified Field has still not been verified empirically.
⁶

Atomic reductionism is anathema to both religion and modern spirituality. Whether they are promoting Christianity or the New Age, authors are tempted to indulge in pseudoscience to buttress their conviction that reality cannot be broken down into tiny, independent units but is one, united whole.

Although the field concept was not developed mathematically until the nineteenth century, it was suggested by Newton's law of gravity. Newton never provided an explanation for the nature of gravity—just a formula to use for calculating the force on a body some distance from another body. When pressed, he speculated that gravity might be the result of the flow of etheric particles between bodies, very much an atomic explanation. But he had no
way to observe these particles and simply said, “
Hypotheses non fingo
” (“I frame no hypotheses”).

In the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday (died 1867), James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879), and others introduced the idea of the field to describe electric and magnetic phenomena. The field concept was applied to gravity as well. Fields were viewed as continuous media that surround a body and produce forces by reaching out and interacting with another body some distance away. A body needs mass to have a gravitational field, it needs electric charge to have an electric field, and it needs an electrical current, that is, a moving electric charge, to have a magnetic field.

This was the concept. But, more important, Newton's law of gravity gave an equation allowing one to calculate the gravitational field surrounding any distribution of mass. From this one could proceed to calculate the force on a particle of mass
m
by calculating the field and multiplying it by
m.

Faraday had shown empirically that the electric and magnetic fields were different aspects of the same phenomenon. This actually follows from Galilean relativity. An observer in the reference frame in which a charged particle is at rest will witness phenomena that can be described by an electric field. Another observer in a reference moving with respect to the charge will witness phenomena that can be described by a magnetic field, since the moving charge is an electric current and magnetic fields are produced by currents.

The two fields were united into a single
electromagnetic
field in equations derived by Maxwell and published in 1861 and 1862. These equations, along with the equation for calculating the force on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field derived by Hendrik Lorentz, provided everything that there was to know about classical electrodynamics. The theory was complete. Classical electrodynamics has been used up to the present day for computing the electromagnetic fields produced by macroscopic objects, such as a radar antenna.

When applied in a vacuum, Maxwell's equations had a solution that mathematically was a wave that travelled at a speed whose numerical value was the same as the speed of light in a vacuum,
c
. This implied that light can be modeled as an electromagnetic wave in which oscillating electric and magnetic fields travel through space. Further, the equations predicted that
electromagnetic waves with frequencies outside the spectrum of visible light should also exist. In 1886, Heinrich Hertz (died 1894) verified this prediction by generating low-frequency radio waves that traveled at the speed of light.