God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (28 page)

This is not to imply that the concept of information and the metaphor of the universe as a quantum computer are not useful. The great physicist John Wheeler, who inspired Lloyd, famously called the concept of casting physics in terms of information, “It from bit.”
⁸⁴
Lloyd says he has proved a conjecture originally proposed by Feynman, who was Wheeler's student, that “quantum computers could function as a universal quantum simulator whose dynamics could be the analog of any desired physical dynamics.
⁸⁵
As far as I know, this is the case for classical computers as well.

Lloyd then calculates that the cosmic computer can store 10
⁹²
bits and has performed a maximum of 10
¹²²
operations on those bits in the age of the universe. These are large numbers, but they are finite. Furthermore, they grow as the universe expands, opening up more and more possible arrangements of matter as time goes on. This can happen because the internal energy of the universe increases as the universe expands. This does not violate the first law of thermodynamics because that energy comes from the work done
on
the universe by the negative pressure of the dark energy. No energy is needed from outside. In any case, the complexity of matter is growing all the time.
⁸⁶

As we have seen, the best we can tell from cosmological data is that our universe started out with maximum entropy, meaning minimum (really, zero) information and minimum complexity. At the first operationally definable moment called the Planck time, the cosmic computer had only two possible states: one bit on which one operation could be performed. But this was sufficient to start things off. As the universe expanded, more and more bits were generated, and more and more operations were performed. Thus, complex phenomena such as life were inevitable without any fine-tuning.

Far from providing aid and comfort to those who seek evidence for a creator, the computer universe makes the existence of a creator an even more unnecessary and baseless hypothesis.

THE COSMIC INSIGNIFICANCE OF HUMANITY

Since Copernicus, humanity's conception of its place in the universe has steadily diminished from the biblical teaching that we are the center of the universe to one in which we are but a miniscule speck in space and time. Once we had telescopes with which to peer into the sky, our view of the universe grew from originally that of a single star system and its planets to a galaxy of a hundred billion stars and on to a visible universe of 100 billion galaxies. And that was not the end of it. As we have seen, since the 1980s we have found good reasons to think that our visible universe is but a drop of water in an ocean of galaxies lying beyond our light horizon, perhaps a hundred orders of magnitude larger, that all resulted from the same big bang. Furthermore, this universe may be just one of countless others just as big.

While a god might still preside over all this, it becomes incredible to believe that he, she, or it put his, her, or its favorite creatures on this tiny planet and left the rest of this vast multiverse inaccessible to them.

[Nature] has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy.

—David Hume
¹

CONTINGENCY OR CONVERGENCE?

A
s we saw in
chapter 2
, Aristotle introduced the principle of final cause in which objects move in the direction toward their ultimate goal. For example, of the four elements, fire and air move up, while water and earth move down, because each is heading toward its natural resting place.

Dinesh D'Souza is among many theists who claim that evidence exists for some teleological principle built into nature that causes matter to become increasingly complex with time. He quotes Freeman Dyson:

Before the intricate ordered patterns of life, with trees and butterflies and birds and humans, grew to cover our planet, the earth's surface was a boring unstructured landscape of rock and sand. And before the grand ordered structures of galaxies and stars existed, the universe was a rather uniform and disordered collection of atoms. What we see…is the universe growing visibly more ordered and more lively as it grows older.
²

D'Souza observed that this is a “scientific description,” not “theological speculation.”
³

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had made the argument that evolution does not show signs of progress, that it was arrogant for humans to place
themselves at the top of the evolutionary ladder. However, D'Souza assures us that this is no longer “conventional wisdom” in biology and that some prominent biologists, notably Simon Conway Morris, leading expert on the fossils of the Burgess Shale, and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve have argued that “all this talk about randomness and contingency is overrated.” They claim to see evidence for a plan in evolution.
⁴

In his 2003 book,
Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe
, Conway Morris assembled a collection of examples of what is called
convergent evolution
.
⁵
As he explains it, from very different starting points organisms “navigate” to the same biological solution. In the most commonly discussed example, the same one used by Paley, Conway Morris says the eye evolved on multiple occasions along separate evolutionary lines with the same goal in mind—sight. Conway Morris claims to see the same convergence everywhere, from molecules to social systems, and insists that it is very unlikely to have resulted from conventional Darwinian evolutionary processes.

However, in his review of
Life's Solution
in
The New York Times
, philosopher Elliott Sober pointed out, “You can't show that an event was inevitable or highly probable just by pointing out that it has happened many times. To estimate the probability of the camera eye's evolving, you need to know how many times it evolved and how many times it did not. Conway Morris never investigates how often convergences failed to occur.”
⁶

In fact, if humanity was so inevitable, why did only one of the ten billion or so species that ever lived on Earth develop anything close to human intelligence?

According to Conway Morris, evolution has reached its limit. In a 2009 letter to the
Manchester Guardian
, he betrays a religious predilection that may color his scientific conclusions:

When physicists speak of not only a strange universe, but one even stranger than we can possibly imagine, they articulate a sense of unfinished business that most neo-Darwinians don't even want to think about. Of course our brains are a product of evolution, but does anybody seriously believe consciousness itself is material? Well, yes, some argue just as much, but their explanations seem to have made no headway. We are indeed dealing with unfinished business. God's funeral? I don't think so. Please join me beside the coffin marked Atheism. I fear, however, there will be very few mourners.
⁷

While there is no doubt that some tendency toward convergence is present in evolution, its mere existence does not prove it cannot be a consequence of natural selection. Let us consider the evolution of the eye. The fact that different evolutionary paths lead to the same basic mechanism for sight can be trivially understood without the need for some guiding force. Just apply a little physics. Vision is obviously so important to an animal that strong selective pressures are naturally going to point it in that evolutionary direction. Light is made up of photons and there is only one way that photons can be detected: by knocking electrons in atoms either to a higher energy level or out of the atom altogether where they generate an electrical signal that can be transmitted to the brain. It follows that all evolutionary paths toward sight will have to converge at that point. However, beyond this basic physics there is little convergence evident in detail, with the vision problem solved by evolution at least ten different ways.

D'Souza is being grossly misleading when he says Conway Morris's view is somehow the new conventional wisdom in biology. The majority of biologists still adhere to basic Darwinism, in which life evolved by a process of chance and natural selection. In his 2009 book
Why Evolution Is True
, biologist Jerry Coyne notes that convergent evolution is a well-known process that is fully understood by conventional evolution. He says it “demonstrates three parts of evolutionary theory working together: common ancestry, speciation, and natural selection.”
⁸

On his blog, Coyne comments on the article by Conway Morris in the
Manchester Guardian
that was quoted above:

Conway Morris is way, way peeved at atheists. He mentions them several times in his piece. He thinks he has vanquished them with his “unanswerable” evolutionary arguments. But he has not. He is simply proposing a “God of the gaps” argument, and here the gap is our mind. It's Alfred Russel Wallace [who discovered natural selection simultaneously with Darwin, but became increasingly mystical] recycled. He is wrong: neither will atheism die, or even flinch a bit, and we will, I predict, some day understand, as Darwin believed, that the human mind is simply a product of the blind and materialistic product of natural selection.
⁹

Purpose remains today a major area of conflict between science and religion. Religion still insists that the universe has a purpose, with humanity as its focus. However, no scientific evidence supports this yearning. The world and humanity look exactly as they should look if they are not a part of any divine plan.

TEILHARD'S OMEGA POINT

Perhaps the most original Christian evolutionary theologian was the early twentieth-century Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
¹⁰
Many of his ideas, though rather abstract and obscure, conflicted with church teaching and were banned from publication during his lifetime. Nevertheless, Teilhard became an important cultural figure, an archetype for the intellectual, dissenting priest in several novels and movies.
¹¹
His best-known work is
The Phenomenon of Man
, published in 1959.
¹²

Although Teilhard claimed to argue from science alone, Ian Barbour contends that Teilhard's view was not natural theology but a theology of nature. The Jesuit interpreted evolution metaphysically, writing that it applied to all beings including God.
¹³
The notion that God evolves is hardly a traditional one. Indeed it flies in the face of the universal theological concept of God as eternal and unchanging.

Teilhard was a scientist but primarily a mystic. He was not a dualist, again unconventional for a Catholic priest. But spirit, not matter, is the basic stuff for Teilhard. Reality is ultimately spiritual, with matter being composed of homogeneous units of “psychic energy.” He asserted that the most significant result of evolution is the emergence of human consciousness. Although a recent event in cosmic history, consciousness is not to be regarded as a fleeting phenomenon destined to disappear when humans inevitably become extinct, but as being of primary, eternal importance.

Teilhard equated Christ/God with the evolving cosmos, unfolding and fulfilling himself toward a future
Omega Point
. He proposed a
law of complexity and consciousness
that gives meaning and purpose to everything. Consciousness develops as a property of complexity, which accelerates with time. Teilhard
tried to reduce all phenomena to the information they contain (a recently rediscovered idea), which reveals the meaning, purpose, and goals of cosmic evolution and human destiny.
¹⁴

According to Teilhard, the evolving universe emanated from God at the
Alpha Point
and humankind will eventually return to God as the final goal of cosmogenesis billions of years in the future at the Omega Point.

Not many theologians take the Omega Point notion seriously, but they have taken seriously the idea that evolution shows a movement toward progress, which suggests that some kind of divinely created law is behind a steady increase in complexity. They propose that God uses evolution to carry out his plans.

However, the modern consensus among evolutionary biologists is that evolution by chance and natural selection does not automatically imply an increase in complexity. A mutation might bring about a simpler system better able to survive, or at least not result in species extinction. Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith observed, “There is nothing in Darwinism which enables us to predict a long-term increase in complexity.”
¹⁵
Paleontologist Gould agreed, saying, “Natural selection is a theory of
local
adaptations to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement.”
¹⁶
And biologist and historian William B. Provine summarizes his views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear:

There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death…. There is no ultimate foundation of ethics, no ultimate meaning of life, and no free will for humans either.
¹⁷

While it is true that evolution does not necessarily imply an increase in complexity, obviously such increases do occur and, as we saw in
chapter 4
, simplicity can beget complexity contrary to the claims of intelligent design theorists.

TIPLER'S OMEGA POINT

Physicist Frank Tipler has claimed a scientific basis for Teilhard's Omega Point. In a 1994 book titled
The Physics of Immortality
, Tipler proposed an incredible scenario, based on a rather loose interpretation of physics principles.
¹⁸

In Tipler's scenario, human-created robots eventually fill the universe. These robots create others and the robot species becomes increasingly intelligent. Then, after about a billion-billion years, the universe will be uniformly populated with an extremely advanced form of life that will be capable of feats far beyond anyone's (except Tipler's) imagination.

At that point, Tipler assumes the universe will begin to contract toward what is called the big crunch, the reverse of the big bang. The advanced life form that evolved from our robot creations must collapse the universe in a highly controlled way. Assuming it can manage this, life then converges on the Omega Point. As this happens, time runs slower and slower. This is expected from general relativity, where Einstein showed that a clock in a gravitational field slows down. Clocks would run mighty slow if the entire mass of the universe were concentrated in a volume smaller than a proton. Note that this slowing down would not be observed in the clock's own reference frame; however, from the standpoint of the universe as a whole, the elapsed time would approach eternity.

Tipler associates the Omega Point, as did Teilhard, with God. Being the ultimate form of power and knowledge, the Omega Point would also be the ultimate in Love. Loving us, it would proceed to resurrect all humans who ever lived (along with their favorite pets and popular endangered species). This is accomplished by means of a perfect computer simulation, or “emulation.” Since each of us is defined by our DNA, the Omega Point simply simulates all possible humans that could ever live, which of course includes you and me. Our individual memories have long dissolved into entropy, but Omega has us relive our lives in an instant, along with all the other possible lives we could have lived. Those deemed deserving by this Omega God will get to live even better lives, including lots of sex with the most desirable partners they can imagine. Those deemed undeserving by Omega will be put through purgatories, but if they perform satisfactorily they may gain heaven. So, we can all
correct our mistakes. I will live a life where I learn to hit a curveball. Hitler will live a life in which he is Jewish. Barack Obama will be president over and over again until he finally gets it right.
¹⁹