Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

329 Pages·2003·2.5 MB·English

by  Stephen M. Barr

Modern Physics
and
Ancient Faith

M
O
and
D
E Ancient Faith
R
N
Physics
S T E P H E N M . B A R R
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Barr new pg iv_00Barr_i-xii_REV 3/8/16 9:55 AM Page 1
University ofNotre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2003 by University ofNotre Dame
Paperback edition published in 2006
Reprinted in 2013 with a new Preface
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barr, Stephen M., 1953–
Modern physics and ancient faith / Stephen M. Barr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 10: 0-268-03471-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 10: 0-268-02198-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-02198-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-07592-7 (web pdf)
1.Physics—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BL265 .P4 B37 2003
291.1'75—dc21 2002151565
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Preface (2013) ix
Acknowledgments xi
Part I The Conflict between Religion and Materialism
1 The Materialist Creed 1
2 Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology 4
3 Scientific Materialism and Nature 19
The Scientific Materialistís View of Nature 19
Five Plot Twists 22
A New Story and a New Moral 28
Part II In the Beginning
4 The Expectations 33
5 How Things Looked One Hundred Years Ago 36
6 The Big Bang 38
The Discovery of the Big Bang 38
Attempts to Avoid the Big Bang 44
The Big Bang Confirmed 45
7 Was the Big Bang Really the Beginning? 47
The Universe in the Standard Big Bang Model 48
The Bouncing Universe Scenario 52
The Baby Universes Scenario 54
The Eternal Inflation Scenario 54
8 What If the Big Bang Was Not the Beginning? 58
vi CONTENTS
Part III Is the Universe Designed?
9 The Argument from Design 65
The Cosmic Design 65
Two Kinds of Design 69
10 The Attack on the Argument from Design 71
Pure Chance 71
The Laws of Nature 72
Natural Selection 72
11 The Design Argument and the Laws of Nature 76
Two Ways to Think about Laws of Nature 76
In Science, Order Comes from Order 79
In Science, Order Comes from GreaterOrder 80
An Example Taken from Nature: The Growth of Crystals 85
The Order in the Heavens 87
12 Symmetry and Beauty in the Laws of Nature 93
13 “What Immortal Hand or Eye?” 105
The Issue 105
Can Chance Explain It? 107
Is Natural Selection Enough? 109
Does Darwin Give “Design without Design”? 111
Part IV Man’s Place in the Cosmos
14 The Expectations 115
15 The Anthropic Coincidences 118
16 Objections to the Idea of Anthropic Coincidences 138
The Objections 140
Answers to the Objections 143
17 Alternative Explanations of the Anthropic Coincidences 149
The Weak Anthropic Principle: Many Domains 151
The Weak Anthropic Principle: Many Universes 152
The Weakness of the Weak Anthropic Principle 153
The Problem with Too Many Universes 154
18 Why Is the Universe So Big? 158
How Old Must a Universe Be? 160
How Big Must a Universe Be? 160
Are We Really So Small? 161
CONTENTS vii
Part V What Is Man?
19 The Issue 167
The Religious View 168
The Materialist View 169
Clearing Up Some Confusions 172
20 Determinism and Free Will 175
The Overthrow of Determinism 175
Quantum Theory and Free Will 178
Is Free Will Real? 184
21 Can Matter “Understand”? 190
Abstract Understanding 191
What are Abstract Ideas? 193
Truth 197
If Not the Brain, Then What and How? 204
22 Is the Human Mind Just a Computer? 207
What a Computer Does 207
What Gödel Showed 211
The Arguments of Lucas and Penrose 213
Avenues of Escape 215
23 What Does the Human Mind Have That Computers Lack? 220
Can One Have a Simple Idea? 223
Is the Materialist View of the Mind Scientific? 225
24 Quantum Theory and the Mind 227
The London-Bauer Argument in Brief 229
Going into More Detail 232
Is the Traditional Interpretation Absurd? 242
25 Alternatives to Traditional Quantum Theory 245
Modifying Quantum Theory 246
Reinterpreting Quantum Theory: The “Many-Worlds” Idea 248
26 Is a Pattern Emerging? 253
Appendices 257
A. God, Time, and Creation 257
B. Attempts to Explain the Beginning Scientifically 268
C. Gödel’s Theorem 279
Notes 289
Index 307

Preface
( 2 0 1 3 )
One danger in drawing philosophical conclusions from scientific discoveries
is that science can change and pull the rug out from under you. Indeed, a cen-
tral claim of this book is that precisely this happened to the atheistic philosophy
called “scientific materialism,” which was largely inspired by obsolete, pre-
twentieth-century science. In writing this book, therefore, I tried to be cautious
in my own claims and to make clear which scientific ideas were solidly estab-
lished, which were merely probable, and which were just interesting specu -
lations. I wanted my book to stand the test of time.
Since the book appeared in 2003, two speculative ideas—“quantum creation
of the universe” and “the multiverse,” both of which go back decades—have
received a lot of attention in the media, often being portrayed as threats to reli-
gious belief. The argument that “quantum creation” would eliminate the need
for a divine creator has been promoted especially by Stephen Hawking and
Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book The Grand Design.As I anticipated that
this argument might grow in popularity, I included an appendix (Appendix B)
that explained the physics of “quantum creation of universes” in terms acces-
sible to the layman and also why the atheist argument based on it is fallacious.
I also discussed the multiverse idea at great length in this book, especially in
chapter 17. I did not use the word“multiverse,” however, for it was not as widely
used as in 2003 as it is now. Instead, I called the idea the Weak Anthropic Prin-
ciple. “Multiverse” is a much better term, but otherwise there is nothing in the
substance of the discussion in chapter 17 that I would change today.
The significance of the multiverse idea, religiously speaking, is that it could
provide a naturalistic explanation of at least some “anthropic coincidences” (by
which is meant those “fine-tunings” of physical constants and other features of
the laws of physics that make life possible in our universe). The book’s dis cussion
of anthropic coincidences has held up well, but two recent developments are
worth noting. The first concerns the well-known argument that even a slightly
stronger nuclear force would have made “di-protons” stable and thus made stars
like the Sun burn up too fast for life to have time to evolve. Recently it has been
pointed out that this could have been made up for by other kinds of stars last-
ing long enough to incubate life; so the “anthropic” implications of a stronger
ix