God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (27 page)

The authors have learned the lesson not to mention “God” too often, but the media has nevertheless jumped on their final conclusion: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
⁶⁷

The Grand Design
is an unfortunately misleading title, probably chosen by the publisher, as many titles are, with an eye toward selling the most books. People will read into this title the implication that there is still “something out there,” some supernatural force that is behind everything. This is a common belief today among the many who are abandoning organized religion but are finding it difficult to accept the strict materialism and lack of design implicit in atheism. The book should have been called
The Grand Accident
, because that's what “spontaneous (creation)” (see preceding paragraph) refers to—an uncaused accident.

Hawking and Mlodinow begin by informing us, “philosophy is dead,”
that it has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, and that scientists “have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
⁶⁸
In this I think they are wrong.

For centuries, the message of science has been that all knowledge of the world is obtained through direct observation. As we have seen, the revolutionary theory of quantum mechanics developed in the last century clashed with everyday experience but has proved enormously successful, passing with flying colors the many stringent laboratory tests to which it has been subjected for a hundred years.

However, no agreement has ever been reached on what the quantum models inform us about regarding the true nature of reality. This is by contrast to classical Newtonian physics, where no one doubts that an apple and the moon are real. Hawking and Mlodinow conclude: “There is no picture-or theory-independent concept of reality.”
⁶⁹
They call this view
model-dependent reality
.

This is not as world-shaking as it seems if you give philosophers some credit. As has been mentioned, most theoretical physicists still hold a naive realistic view of their theories, in which not only apples and the moon are real but so are electromagnetic fields and quantum wave functions. But, despite the disdain of Hawking and Mlodinow, philosophers have been telling physicists (to deaf ears) for years that all observations are “theory laden.” Indeed, centuries ago the great philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out that every human concept is based on observations that are operated on by the mind so that we have no access to a mind-independent reality. Hawking and Mlodinow say, “It is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observations.”
⁷⁰
This I do agree with, as has already been emphasized in several places.

The authors express their preference, as do many contemporary physicists, for the formulation of quantum mechanics proposed by physicist Richard Feynman while still a graduate student at Princeton in the 1940s, mentioned here and in
chapter 6
, that they refer to as “alternative histories.” Actually, a better term is “sum over histories.” In this model, one does not follow the traditional procedure of calculating the path of a particle, or system of particles, by applying some equation of motion. Rather, one assumes all possible paths
exist and by summing a “probability amplitude” over all those paths, the probability for the particle or system ending in a specific state can be computed.

For example, in the double slit experiment, each photon from the source takes both paths available to it and goes simultaneously through both slits. The Feynman model enables you to calculate the observed interference pattern. If you place a detector along one of the paths, you then know which path was followed by the photon, and the model correctly predicts that the interference pattern will go away.

Hawking and Mlodinow apply Feynman's ideas to
M-theory
, a generalized extension of string theory. Although neither theory has come close to being testable in the laboratory, not only in the present but perhaps in the foreseeable future (if ever), Hawking and Mlodinow argue, disputably, that M-theory is the only candidate for an ultimate “theory of everything” that meets all the requirements for such a theory.

M-theory has eleven dimensions, ten of space and one of time. Since we only need three dimensions of space along with the one of time to describe observations, seven space dimensions are curled up at tiny distances far smaller than our most powerful instruments can probe. The shapes of these inner dimensions carry all the information needed to build the universe. The problem is, M-theory provides no unique shape but allows for 10
¹⁰⁰
possible shapes. (Some say 10
⁵⁰⁰
, but what's a factor of 10
⁴⁰⁰
between friends?)

This means that there are 10
¹⁰⁰
(or 10
⁵⁰⁰
) possible universes. Applying Feynman's ideas, Hawking and Mlodinow argue that these universes constitute alternative histories that all exist and a sum over them should be taken to get the probability for the universe that we observe. As they put it, “The universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every possible way.”
⁷¹

So it is no longer assumed that there is an initial state, presumably “nothing,” from which a predetermined path is followed to the present. Rather, the universe is taken as it is at the present time and, somewhat like a detective reconstructing a course of events at a crime scene, the most probable path back to the origin is calculated. Note that the histories that contribute to the Feynman sum depend on our current observations. Thus they do not have an independent existence but depend on what we measure. Hawking and Mlodinow say, “We create history by our observations, rather than history creating us.”

This unfortunate wording comes dangerously close to the claims of quantum spiritualists such as Deepak Chopra, who say that quantum mechanics tells us that we make our own reality (see
chapter 6
). But this is not quite the proposal made in this book, which is far more plausible. Human consciousness is not deciding what reality is. Reality is all the possible histories, and these can't be changed by thinking about them. All these histories contributed to our present state and our observations pin down that state, enabling us to compute the probability for each history reaching that state.

In the Feynman method, for classical macroscopic systems, the probability for one path far exceeds the probability for the others and so it is the one we witness the system taking. Only for quantum phenomena, such as photons passing through slits, are the probabilities for different paths comparable.

So, 10
¹⁰⁰
universes converged on the one that has the necessary structure to produce life as we know it. With such a huge number of possibilities, many would be expected to allow for some kind of life different from ours as well as for ours. Thus, the theological claim that our universe was exquisitely fine-tuned for us by a creator is once more refuted. Hawking and Mlodinow make it clear that the idea of multiple universes, the multiverse, was not invented to account for apparent fine-tuning, as often charged by apologists, but is “a consequence of the no-boundary condition as well as many other theories of modern cosmology.”
⁷²
And once you have one accidental universe, you will have many.

Some reviewers have criticized
The Grand Design
for basing its case on the highly speculative M-theory. Actually, even without M-theory, the alternate histories of Feynman, together with cosmological models such as the no-boundary model, are sufficient to provide a purely natural, noncausal explanation for the existence of our universe and our place in it. M-theory or no M-theory, the pieces of our universe fell into the places where they are, not because of a guiding hand and a grand design, but through mere accident.

THE UNIVERSE AS A QUANTUM COMPUTER

The metaphors people have used throughout human existence to describe reality depend on the models with which they describe their experiences. Seeing animals all around them, primitive people attributed natural phenomena to the action of animate spirits that were contained in all things, living and nonliving. When agriculture developed and people became settled in villages ruled by chiefdoms, the chief became the metaphor for the gods. That is, although supernatural, the gods were human with all our imperfections. When the villages combined into city-states ruled by kings, the gods gradually become more majestic, with a major god ruling over a royal court of lesser gods. With the rise of empires, the next step was monotheism, with a single God ruling over all. See
The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright.
⁷³

With Newtonian mechanics, the metaphor for God became the great craftsman of the Newtonian world machine. Today, with the dominance of computers throughout society, the universe is increasingly being described as a computing machine with the basic stuff of the universe being bits of information—or
qubits
, which are the information units in quantum computers. God is then the great quantum computer programmer.

In their 1992 book,
The Matter Myth
, physicist Paul Davies and science writer John Gribbin declared “the death of materialism.” They write, “Matter as such has been demoted from its central role, to be replaced by concepts such as organization, complexity, and information.”
⁷⁴
In
Programming the Universe
, physicist Seth Lloyd, a pioneer in quantum computing, unsurprisingly agrees with the metaphor of a quantum computer to describe the universe.
⁷⁵

Theologians have found this new information ontology particularly congenial in their continuing attempts to come up with a model of God that is consistent with science. Niels Henrik Gregersen identifies the divine Logos in the first verse of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”) with information.
⁷⁶
Wright calls Logos “the divine algorithm.”
⁷⁷
Gregersen asserts, “God is present in the midst of the world of nature as the informational principle (Logos) and as the energizing principle (Spirit)…. It is only in the interplay between information (Logos) and energy (Spirit) that the world of creation produces evolutionary novelties rather than mere repetitions.”
⁷⁸

Theologian John Haught has reconciled himself to the fact that the metaphor of God as the great craftsman in the sky has seen its day. He writes:

The image of God as a “designer” has become increasingly questionable, especially in view of evolutionary accounts of life. Is it possible, then, that the notion of “information” may be less misleading than that of design in theology's inevitable reflections on how divine purposive action could be operative in the natural world?…In place of design, I would suggest that natural theology may more appropriately understand divine influence along the lines of informational flow.
⁷⁹

Another prominent theologian, Keith Ward, comments:

In my opinion…one may hold a view that the universe is constructed on an informational pattern that is carried and transmitted by the mind of God. The God hypothesis is not contradicted by and is quite strongly supported by some, of the speculations of contemporary information theory. So my conclusion is that information is the ultimate ontological reality held in the mind of God.
⁸⁰

What is information anyway? Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, identified it with entropy.
⁸¹
When a signal is sent from one spot to another, the information transferred was defined by Shannon as being equal to the entropy change that takes place, when the latter is expressed in bits. The entropy lost is the information gained.

Entropy has been part of physics since the nineteenth century, so it is not clear what is new with the new information metaphors. The theologians quoted above suggest other forms of information, but they do not quantify them, so we should stick to Shannon's definition in order to keep things precise.

Now, it is true that entropy is a rather abstract mathematical quantity. I still remember as a sophomore in engineering school around 1952, sitting in a thermodynamics class with my classmates pressing the instructor, “What is entropy? What's it made of?” We wanted to see it and touch it. I don't recall getting a satisfactory answer, although his response was undoubtedly correct. I would have the same problem when I taught thermodynamics in later years.

Well, you can't see and touch entropy just as you can't see and touch the quantum wave function. And, you can't see and touch information. Entropy is just a measure of how many possible physical states exist. Information is its complement. It's how much the possibilities are reduced when we learn about the actual states. Information and entropy are out there in the Platonic world of ideal forms. They are just abstract objects we use in our mathematical descriptions of the world, and that world is still made of matter and nothing else—according to our best current knowledge.
⁸²
If the universe is a digital computer, that computer still is made of elementary particles.

Theologian Gregersen makes a key observation:
⁸³

The theological candidate of truth that the divine Logos is the informational resource of the universe would be
scientifically
falsified if the concept of information could be fully reduced to properties of mass and energy transactions.

Well, perhaps this does not constitute a falsification, but as far as we can tell, information does reduce to mass and energy transactions. Information can be embodied in many ways, but there is no disembodied information.