Chapter II. Forces in the Universe: essence and manifestations
7. God, the anthropist Winnie the Pooh and Co.
God. It was mentioned earlier that some scientists hold to the approach according to which the laws (or the Single Law) precede the emergence of the Universe. In that same section, it was said that to another category of scientists the Universe, Nature and God are practically synonyms, or, more precisely, God in their writings often appears as a metaphorical name for nature (Spinoza, Einstein). There are some among them, though, who believe that the Universe itself is part of God, or that it rests on God – created by Him, but not merging with Him. This approach is called pantheism; the term was introduced in the early 19th century by the German philosopher Karl Krause. In the contemporary variant this idea is somewhat modified in the sense that the laws of the Universe are a creation of God, or, in S. Hawking’s expression, they are "the mind of God". "These laws – writes Hawking, – may have originally been directed by God, but it appears that He has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not intervene in it."[1] This view was held by Newton, for example, and – more consistently - by Leibniz; in Hegel’s works it is implied.
A cardinally different approach was held by the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765), whose weight in science was comparable to that of the above-mentioned luminaries. He believed that “…it is easy to be a philosopher when you’ve learned four words by heart: God created it thus – and offer this as an answer in place of any other causes.” It is worth stressing that such famous thinkers as David Hume and Kant likewise objected sharply to the notion that God is the creator of nature.
Among contemporary physicists and astrophysicists, few hold to the “divine” approach, though it is possible that there are somewhat more of those among the evolutionist scientists. Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, claims that whenever someone mentions the “creation” of the Universe, the reaction of "most of my fellow physicists is a mild surprise and amusement that anyone still takes all that seriously." Weinberg himself in one of his books, in a special chapter titled What about God?, proves convincingly the absurdity of this view against the backdrop of the process of de-mystification first of the “Heavens” thanks to such titans of science as Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno and even the believer Newton, then of life, starting with the works of Justus Liebig, Darwin, Alfred Wallace et al.
Today God has become unnecessary, at least in the science community; Weinberg attests to this, quoting conversations with fellow physicists and astrophysicists. He mentions in this connection his 1977 book The First Three Minutes, in which he “rashly” remarked: "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." Some scientists understood this remark as regret about the Universe’s pointlessness from a man nostalgic about a world in which the Heavens sing hosannas to God. A poll of 27 cosmogonists and physicists was even undertaken on this occasion. Ten of them agreed unreservedly that the Universe is pointless. Thirteen did not agree, but three of them disagreed because they simply did not understand why anyone would expect the Universe to have any kind of point. The Harvard astronomer Margaret Geller asked, “…Why should it have a point? What point? It is just a physical system, what point is there? I've always been puzzled by that statement.” The Princeton astrophysicist Jim Peebles remarked, “I'm willing to believe that we are flotsam and jetsam.” Another Princeton astrophysicist, Edwin Turner, suspected that Weinberg had intended the remark to annoy the reader.[2]
Nonetheless, while agreeing entirely with the essence of the criticisms of the “divine” approach to the emergence of the Universe, I do see in it a very fruitful phenomenon, however strange that may seem. The matter is not just that the ordinary Joe, not well versed in stuff like quanta, perceives much easier the six-day version of the world’s origin, described in the Bible, than the three-minute version of the Big Bang theory, especially the initial period of a trillion-to-the-trillionth-degree fraction of a second. As I mentioned in passing in the previous chapter, the idea of God always occurred to scientists whenever it was difficult or sometimes even impossible to figure out the essence of things. This is especially true of research of the origin of the world, or the Universe; or even of contemporary ideas that center on the Big Bang. Almost everyone admits that it is impossible to determine what transpired in the interval between t=0 and t=10-43sec. Some scientists simply specify that since this time period cannot possibly be verified or penetrated, we should simply move on and keep on discovering laws and regularities. Others simplify the answer for themselves by saying that only “God knows” (or the equivalent “the Devil knows”) what was “before” or “during” the above-mentioned time interval, and they likewise “move on”, fruitfully discovering the regularities of this “afterward”. As for those who attempted to figure out what did transpire “in there”, they were mired in the topic and never managed to extract themselves from it. As a result, many phenomena of the “afterward” remained unsolved. I do not exclude the possibility that without this oh-so-useful God science would have been left without many outstanding scientists, such as Newton or Hegel.
One should keep in mind that God, nothing, and other abstractions and even myths are concepts and categories of our being. They consist of adequate reflections of not only the substantial being, but also of the conceptual being, a large portion of which absorbs distorted, mythical, irrational notions about the surrounding world. By far the greater part of mankind’s existence falls in the periods of irrational ideas about the surrounding world. This is likely a natural period in mankind’s formation. Dostoyevsky once said very fortunately: “if everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen.” (This phrase is actually an artistic expression of the correlation between regularity and chance.) It is imperative here not to forget one thing I mentioned in connection with the category nothing. God is a category of our being, but being is not a category of God. There is no God in being; He is present in our brains as an image or a concept – in everyone’s brain, though for different needs. Some need God in order to be His slaves, others have use for Him in politics; still others need to understand why do people need Him, and why it is time to put Him to rest.
The anthropic principle. In spite of all this, God still has a presence in science, acquiring new appearances in the guise of “scientific” terminology. In this aspect, He is much more dangerous. I mean in this case the so-called Anthropic Principle, which in simplified form can be expressed thusly: we see the universe the way it is because we exist. Alternatively: if the universe were different, then we would not be in it. A somewhat more complex formulation of the principle goes like this: the physical constants are what they are, for if they were different, life as we know it would not have existed. The most popular formulation belongs to Winnie-the Pooh, who reasoned perfectly “anthropically”: "That buzzing-noise means something. ...If there is a buzzing noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing noise that I know of is because you are a bee. …And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey. …And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it."
In its contemporary form, the Anthropic Principle exists in two variants. The first one is called the Weak anthropic principle; it says: that which we propose to observe must satisfy the conditions necessary for man’s presence as an observer.
The second variant is called the Strong anthropic principle: the Universe must be such that at some stage in its evolution there could exist an observer. One has to admit that this conception of the observer was shared by such major figures in science as Niels Bohr, his colleague of many years John A. Wheeler and Nobel laureate Eugene Wiggner.
At first sight, it would seem that the Anthropic principle has nothing whatsoever to do with God. The formulation of the problem appears to be almost scientific; moreover, its scientific character is “enhanced” by the theory of “delicate fine-tuning of the Universe”, supported by the ideas of “self-organization” of the Universe. Ultimately, though, all these principles and theories amount to the “purposefulness” of the Universe’s evolution, with Man (capital M, of course) at its pinnacle - Man who either merges with Omega-God (Chardin) or cooperates with Him. The most important thing is this: having accepted this approach, as suggested by its active adherent Reomar Rovinsky, "one should give recognition without protest to the hypothesis of the possible existence of an “organizing principle” that determines the character of the directed development of the Universe and its particular parts" (ibid). This “organizing” principle points in two directions: one is obviously toward beloved God, the other is toward “self-organization” of the Universe.
The divine variant following from the Anthropic principle coincides with the claim that God created the Universe and its laws. It is no accident that Weinberg did not even bother to divorce the “anthropists” and the “diviners”. By the way, he criticizes John Wheeler for his adherence to the well-known Copenhagen school whose followers believe that quantitative magnitudes such as location, or energy, or momentum have no value until such time when they are measured by the observer’s mechanism. This view follows from positivism, which in Weinberg’s interpretation expresses the idea of accepting only those things that can be observed. He says: "Other physicists including myself prefer another, realist, way of looking at quantum mechanics, in terms of a wave function that can describe laboratories and observers as well as atoms and molecules, governed by laws that do not materially depend on whether there are any observers or not."
Promoted within the framework of the Anthropic principle is also the idea that the fundamental constants have value for the reason that they fit exceedingly well the explanation of the emergence of intelligent life in the Universe. However, it is known that in some constructions of the modern theories of the Universe the theoretical possibility is assumed that the constants may change over large time periods (one of these possibly changing world constants is the “alpha”, the constant of the thin structure, responsible for the interaction of light with substance). Should these suppositions be confirmed, the thesis about the constants being geared toward the emergence of the observer would naturally collapse. However, even should no such confirmation come, the science of physics keeps discovering ever more fundamental particles and physical principles that have ever less relation to intelligence. The gluons, gravitons, quarks, virtual particles of the vacuum, dark matter et al. - which have “no idea themselves” what they will turn into - have no direct relation to man.
This is where it comes to the rescue – the already-mentioned theory of “delicate fine-tuning of the Universe”, proposed about twenty years ago by P. Davies and picked up very enthusiastically in Russia. Its essence is this: yes, the observer did emerge substantially later than the Universe, so he could not observe its birth and evolution, but nature itself has arranged everything so “delicately” that the observer simply had to appear.
So what are the arguments in favor of this theory? Rovinsky himself lists them in his already-mentioned book. Firstly, he suggests dispensing with the cliché that the natural processes in which man does not participate cannot proceed “purposefully”; otherwise, we would have to rely only on accidents, which can take us “in the wrong direction.” Secondly, nature is assumed not to possess infinite time for domination of accidents. Thirdly, any digressions from these chance occurences, for example a change in one constant within the limits of 10-15%, would have prevented, say, the proton from joining with the neutron, and that would have made impossible nucleo-synthesis and the formation of composite nuclei. Instead of that, nature has “with great precision “adjusted” a large number of micro-world parameters that appear to us to be independent, in order to make possible the existence of the evolving Universe.” In the final count “the probability of each chance occurrence is very small, but their joint chance emergence is simply improbable.” In order to avoid this improbability, matter, nature or the Universe took care to endow itself with systemic character, dynamism and self-organization, and in particular, “self-organization appears as the moving force of the creation observed in our World.”
In other words, inorganic matter in its substantional form (thing-in-itself) is endowed with thinking properties on the level of human concepts. That is, the gluons that join quarks into protons and neutrons “purposefully” prepared these particles for their subsequent joining with electrons, which in their turn self-organized into nuclides in order to give rise to the evolution of the Universe until it produces an observer. At this point one finds it easier to believe in God with His ability to put the world together in six days than in “thinking” elementary particles. One also has to admit that it is this kind of logic that was characteristic of the empiriocriticists of the late 19th century, and it is characteristic to this day of some reductionist physicists who maintain that though not all of matter thinks, photons do. (The latter will be discussed later in the section about thought and consciousness.)
Let us assume that I agree with this absurd theory: matter has self-organized, continues to evolve and finally gives birth to man. Whatever for? Let me remind you that our Luminary must eventually cool down in some way or another (no one argues against that); the Earth then turns into a lifeless cosmic object, and mankind naturally disappears. So where is the “delicate fine-tuning” here? And what good is this “purposefulness” of the Universe, if it gives birth to the observer-man and then destroys him?[3]
Oh well, never mind man. What about the Universe itself, threatened by the “heat death”? The majority of astrophysicists keep writing and talking about it, and the Second Law of thermodynamics compels it to that end. The “fine-tuners” are silent on this matter. The “anthropists”, however, are not phased by this question; they claim that the Second Law simply does not exist. Now we have arrived at a very important topic: the effects of the Second law of thermodynamics.
[1] I strongly doubt, though, that Hawking himself believes in God, even though he exploits the quoted phrase constantly. Apparently he needs it in order to give no offense to believers, but most importantly – in order to do no harm to the sales of his books, which he admitted candidly, albeit kind of jokingly, when talking of the success of his A Brief History of Time. – See: Hawking. Black Holes and Baby Universes, 37.
[2] Among the surveyed members of the National Academy of Science of the USA (in 1998) only 7% admitted to being believers. – Nature (23 July 1998): 313.
[3] I want to note especially that the most active opponent of God and the Anthropic Principle is S. Weinberg , who utterly demolished all these “mystical yada-yada” – See: Weinberg, Steven, "A Designer Universe?", Skeptical Inquirer (Sept. 2001). Amomng contemporary Russian scientists known to me, the Academicians V. L. Ginzburg and Ye. L. Feinberg hold to similar positions and speak out boldly against obscurancy in science.
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)