The Big Picture

Home > Other > The Big Picture > Page 26
The Big Picture Page 26

by Carroll, Sean M.


  06

  construed, as far as theism is concerned?

  07

  It’s hard to doubt that the absence of evil would be taken as very strong

  08

  evidence in favor of the existence of God. If humanity simply evolved ac-

  09

  cording to natural selection, without any divine guidance or interference,

  10

  we would expect to inherit a wide variety of natural impulses— some for

  11

  good, some for not so good. The absence of evil in the world would be hard

  12

  to explain under atheism, but relatively easy under theism, so it would

  13

  count as evidence for the existence of God.

  14

  But if that’s true, the fact that we do experience evil is unambiguously

  15

  evidence against the existence of God. If the likelihood of no evil is larger

  16

  under theism, then the likelihood of evil is larger under atheism, so evil’s

  17

  existence increases our credence that atheism is correct.

  18

  Put in those terms, it’s easy to come up with features of our universe that

  19

  provide evidence for atheism over theism. Imagine a world in which mira-

  20

  cles happened frequently, rather than rarely or not at all. Imagine a world

  21

  in which all of the religious traditions from around the globe independently

  22

  came up with precisely the same doctrines and stories about God. Imagine

  23

  a universe that was relatively small, with just the sun and moon and Earth,

  24

  no other stars or galaxies. Imagine a world in which religious texts consis-

  25

  tently provided specific, true, non intuitive pieces of scientific information.

  26

  Imagine a world in which human beings were completely separate from the

  27

  rest of biological history. Imagine a world in which souls survived after

  28

  death, and frequently visited and interacted with the world of the living,

  29

  telling compelling stories of life in heaven. Imagine a world that was free of

  30

  random suffering. Imagine a world that was perfectly just, in which the

  31

  relative state of happiness of each person was precisely proportional to their

  32

  virtue.

  33

  In any of those worlds, diligent seekers of true ontology would quite

  34

  rightly take those aspects of reality as evidence for God’s existence. It

  S35

  N36

  147

  Big Picture - UK final proofs.indd 147

  20/07/2016 10:02:43

  T H E B IG PIC T U R E

  01

  follows, as the night the day, that the absence of these features is evidence

  02

  in favor of atheism.

  03

  How strong that evidence is, is another question entirely. We could try

  04

  to quantify the overall effect, but we’re faced with a very difficult obstacle:

  05

  theism isn’t very well defined. There have been many attempts, along the

  06

  lines of “God is the most perfect being conceivable,” or “God is the ground-

  07

  ing of all existence, the universal condition of possibility.” Those sound

  08

  crisp and unambiguous, but they don’t lead to precise likelihoods along the

  09

  lines of “the probability that God, if he exists, would give clear instructions

  10

  on how to find grace to people of all times and cultures.” Even if one claims

  11

  that the notion of God itself is well defined, the connection between that

  12

  concept and the actuality of our world remains obscure.

  13

  One could try to avoid the problem by denying that theism makes any

  14

  predictions at all for what the world should be like— God’s essence is mys-

  15

  terious and impenetrable to our minds. That doesn’t solve the problem— as

  16

  long as atheism does make predictions, evidence can still accumulate one

  17

  way or the other— but it does ameliorate it somewhat. Only at a significant

  18

  cost, however: if an ontology predicts almost nothing, it ends up explaining

  19

  almost nothing, and there’s no reason to believe it.

  20

  •

  21

  22

  There are some features of our world that count as evidence in favor of the-

  23

  ism, just as some features are evidence for atheism. Imagine a world in

  24

  which nobody had thought of the concept of God— the idea had simply

  25

  never occurred. Given our definition of theism, that’s a very unlikely world

  26

  if God exists. It would seem a shame for God to go to all the trouble to cre-

  27

  ate the universe and humankind, and then never let us know about his ex-

  28

  istence. So it’s perfectly reasonable to say that the simple fact that people

  29

  think about God counts as some evidence that he is real.

  30

  That’s a somewhat whimsical example, but there are more serious ones.

  31

  Imagine a world with physical matter, but in which life never arose. Or a

  32

  universe with life, but no consciousness. Or a universe with conscious be-

  33

  ings, but ones who found no joy or meaning in their existence. At first

  34

  glance, the likelihoods of such versions of reality would seem to be higher

  35S

  under atheism than under theism. Much of the task of the rest of this book

  36N

  is to describe how these features are quite likely in a naturalistic worldview.

  148

  Big Picture - UK final proofs.indd 148

  20/07/2016 10:02:43

  A b du C t I n g g O d

  There’s not much to be gained by rehearsing all of the arguments for and

  01

  against theism here. What matters more is understanding the basis for

  02

  making progress on this and similar questions. We lay out our prior cre-

  03

  dences, determine the likelihoods for different things to happen under each

  04

  competing conception of the world, and then update our credences on the

  05

  basis of what we observe. That’s just as true for the existence of God as it is

  06

  for the theory of continental drift or the existence of dark matter.

  07

  It all sounds very tidy, but we are fallible, finite, biased humans. Some-

  08

  one will argue that a universe with a hundred billion galaxies is exactly

  09

  what God would naturally create, while someone else will roll their eyes

  10

  and ask whether that expectation was actually put forward before we went

  11

  out and discovered the galaxies in our telescopes.

  12

  All we can hope to do is to survey our own planets of belief, recognize

&nbs
p; 13

  our biases, and try to correct for them the best we can. Atheists sometimes

  14

  accuse religious believers of being victims of wishful thinking— believing

  15

  in a force beyond the physical world, a higher purpose to existence, and

  16

  especially a reward after death, simply because that’s what they want to be

  17

  true. This is a perfectly understandable bias, one we would be wise to rec-

  18

  ognize and try to take into consideration.

  19

  But there are biases on both sides. Many people may be comforted by

  20

  the idea of a powerful being who cares about their lives, and who deter-

  21

  mines ultimate standards of right and wrong behavior. Personally, I am not

  22

  comforted by that at all— I find the idea extremely off- putting. I would

  23

  rather live in a universe where I am responsible for creating my own values

  24

  and living up to them the best I can, than in a universe in which God hands

  25

  them down, and does so in an infuriatingly vague way. This preference

  26

  might unconsciously bias me against theism. On the other hand, I’m not at

  27

  all happy that my life will come to an end relatively soon (cosmically speak-

  28

  ing), with no hope for continuing on; so that might bias me toward it.

  29

  Whatever biases I may have, I need to keep them in mind while trying to

  30

  objectively weigh the evidence. It’s all any of us can hope to do from our

  31

  tiny perch in the cosmos.

  32

  33

  34

  S35

  N36

  149

  Big Picture - UK final proofs.indd 149

  20/07/2016 10:02:43

  This page intentionally left blank

  01

  02

  03

  04

  05

  06

  07

  08

  09

  10

  P A R t t h R E E

  11

  12

  E S SE nC E

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  S35

  N36

  Big Picture - UK final proofs.indd 151

  20/07/2016 10:02:43

  This page intentionally left blank

  01

  02

  19

  03

  04

  How Much We Know

  05

  06

  07

  08

  09

  10

  11

  12

  W

  13

  hen I was twelve years old, I was fascinated by psychic powers.

  14

  Who wouldn’t be? It’s a provocative notion, to be able to reach

  15

  out and push things around, hear what other people are think-

  16

  ing, or tell the future, all just by using your mind.

  17

  I read everything I could find about ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance,

  18

  precognition— the whole gamut of mental abilities that stretched beyond

  19

  the ordinary. I was a big fan of comic books, where all the heroes were en-

  20

  dowed with superpowers, but also of science- fiction and fantasy stories, not

  21

  to mention straightforwardly “scientific” accounts of what purported to be

  22

  evidence for human capabilities beyond the normal. I wanted to penetrate

  23

  the mystery, figure out how this kind of thing could really work. I loved

  24

  mind- bending ideas, and what’s more mind- bending than the possibility

  25

  that the mind itself can actually bend things?

  26

  I was also a young scientist at heart. So eventually I decided on the obvi-

  27

  ous course of action— I would perform my own experiments.

  28

  We had a spare room in the ground floor of our house. There I was with

  29

  the door closed, the rest of my family occupied elsewhere. (I didn’t say I was

  30

  an especially courageous young scientist.) I started with small things like

  31

  dice and coins, placed carefully on a smooth tabletop. Then I just . . . thought

  32

  at them. I concentrated as hard as I could, trying to push the little trinkets

  33

  across the table with the sheer force of my mind. Sadly, nothing. I switched

  34

  to easier targets: tiny scraps of paper that shouldn’t require as much force to

  S35

  N36

  153

  Big Picture - UK final proofs.indd 153

  20/07/2016 10:02:43

  T H E B IG PIC T U R E

  01

  get moving. In the end I had to admit it: maybe some people were able to

  02

  push things around just by thinking, but I wasn’t one of them.

  03

  As experiments go, this wasn’t the most careful one ever performed. But

  04

  it was convincing to me at the time. I gave up on the idea that I could move

  05

  things around with my mind, and became pretty skeptical of anyone else

  06

  who claimed to have such powers. I didn’t lose my fascination for mind-

  07

  bending ideas, or penetrating deep mysteries. I still wish it were true that I

  08

  could move objects by thinking at them. It would be really useful, not to

  09

  mention scientifically fascinating.

  10

  •

  11

  12

  A great deal of investigation, more professional than mine, has gone into

  13

  evaluating the possibility of psychic or paranormal phenomena. J. B. Rhine,

  14

  a professor at Duke University, famously carried out a long series of tests

  15

  that concluded that psychic powers were real. His studies were extremely

  16

  controversial; many attempts to replicate them failed, and Rhine was criti-

  17

  cized for having lax protocols that would allow subjects to cheat on his

  18

  tests. Today, parapsychology is not taken seriously by most academics. The

  19

  magician and skeptic James Randi has offered a million dollars to anyone

  20

  who can demonstrate such abilities under controlled conditions; many have

  21

  tried to claim the prize, but to date no one has succeeded.

  22

  And nobody ever will succeed. Psychic powers— defined as mental abil-

  23

  ities that allow a person to observe or manipulate the world in ways other

  24

  than through ordinary physical means— don’t exist. We can say that with

  25
<
br />   confidence, even without digging into any controversies about this or that

  26

  academic study.

  27

  The reason is simple: what we know about the laws of physics is suffi-

  28

  cient to rule out the possibility of true psychic powers.

  29

  That’s a very strong claim. And more than a little bit dangerous: the

  30

  trash heap of history is populated by scientists claiming to know more than

  31

  they really do, or predicting that they will know almost everything any

  32

  day now:

  33

  34

  “[We are] probably nearing the limit of all we can know about

  35S

  astronomy.”

  36N

  — Simon Newcomb, 1888

  154

  Big Picture - UK final proofs.indd 154

  20/07/2016 10:02:43

  h OW M u C h W E K n OW

  “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical

  01

  science have all been discovered.”

  02

  — Albert Michelson, 1894

  03

  04

  “Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months.”

  05

  — Max Born, 1927

  06

  07

  There is a 50 percent chance that “we would find a complete

  08

  unified theory of everything by the end of the century.”

  09

  — Stephen Hawking, 1980

  10

  11

  My claim is different. (That’s what everyone says, of course— but this

  12

  time it really is.) I’m not claiming that we know everything, or anywhere

  13

  close to it. I’m claiming that we know some things, and that those things are

  14

  enough to rule out some other things— including bending spoons with the

  15

  power of your mind. The reason we can say that with confidence relies heav-

  16

  ily on the specific form that the laws of physics take. Modern physics not

  17

  only tells us that certain things are true; it comes with a built-in way of

  18

  delineating the limits of that knowledge— where our theories cease to be

  19

  reliable. To see how that works, in this section we’ll dig into the rules by

  20

  which contemporary physics says the universe operates.

  21

  22

  •

  23

  My twelve- year- old self wasn’t really being overly optimistic, given his

  24

  knowledge at the time. The idea that our minds can reach out and influence

  25

  or observe the outside world seems completely plausible. We see things in

  26

  one place affecting things far away every day. I pick up a remote control,

  27

  push some buttons, and my TV comes to life and changes the channel. I

 

‹ Prev