Farewell to Reality

by Jim Baggott

  The strong anthropic principle

  Carter’s second version of the anthropic principle is the strong anthropic principle: ‘the Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage’.6

  In this definition the key word is ‘must’, and one (somewhat irresistible) interpretation restores intelligent life to its pre-Copernican, fully privileged status. The strong anthropic principle tips us towards teleology — philosophical positions that perceive ultimate purposes, final causes and deliberate design in nature. It puts ‘us’ firmly back at the centre of the picture.

  To be fair to Carter, both his weak and strong anthropic principles were based on the notion of intelligent observers, not necessarily carbon-based life forms like ourselves. He later regretted his use of the word ‘anthropic’.

  But the cat was out of the bag. When theorists John Barrow and Frank Tipler popularized the principle in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, first published in 1986, they made no bones about making both the weak and strong versions all about carbon-based life forms. This was a carefully constructed scholarly survey of the literature on the subject, and although Barrow and Tipler did not argue for any particular position, they extended the principle into some highly speculative, extreme versions and helped to muddy the waters considerably.

  The argument from design

  The strong form of the anthropic principle drags us into some highly contentious and emotionally charged territory.

  There’s a good chance that, having made it this far, you’re a reader who happens to be interested in what contemporary science is saying about the nature of the physical world around us. You’ve hopefully taken the trouble to absorb the six Principles presented in Chapter 1, and whether you agree with them or not, I would assume you’re reasonably clear in your own mind about what science is, broadly speaking.

  I’m hoping that we can therefore agree that intelligent design is not science.

  Intelligent design is a variation of ‘creation science’ (a non-sequitur if ever there was one). As an idea it has a relatively long history, but its modern form was developed by a group of American creationists and is today most closely associated with a non-profit organization called the Discovery Institute, founded in 1990 and based in Seattle, Washington. The institute promotes a number of projects across a range of areas. In the field of science and culture, its website declares its agenda as follows:

  Scientific research and experimentation have produced staggering advances in our knowledge about the natural world, but they have also led to increasing abuse of science as the so-called ‘new atheists’ have enlisted science to promote a materialistic worldview, to deny human freedom and dignity and to smother free inquiry. Our Center for Science and Culture works to defend free inquiry. It also seeks to counter the materialistic interpretation of science by demonstrating that life and the universe are the products of intelligent design and by challenging the materialistic conception of a self-existent, self-organizing universe and the Darwinian view that life developed through a blind and purposeless process.7

  Okay, so we’re clear about that.

  The Discovery Institute’s ambition to get intelligent design taught in science classes alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection led in 2005 to the landmark case of Tammy Kitzmiller et al. vs Dover Area School District et al., which was heard in a US district court in Pennsylvania. Conservative Republican Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science. A Dover school board decision to oblige its staff to teach intelligent design was ruled to be unconstitutional. In a subsequent school board election, the eight board members who had voted for this decision were ousted.

  When I was young, I thoroughly enjoyed the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy and Frederic March as protagonists locked in a courtroom debate about the teaching of evolution in an American school. The film was based on the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which was itself an accurate fictional account of the 1925 trial of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes stood ‘accused’ of teaching the theory of evolution. He was found guilty and fined $100, but the verdict was subsequently overturned following an appeal to the Supreme Court.

  I had imagined that these kinds of courtroom battles were things of history. When I first heard about the Dover School case, eighty years after the Scopes trial, I was utterly shocked. Yes, these were two very different cases. In the first, it was Darwin in the dock. In the second, it was intelligent design. But at stake in both cases was the notion that religious or theistic beliefs should not inform efforts to understand the ‘truths’ of our physical, chemical and biological world. I had assumed that such a notion was by now self-evident in civilized societies and that there had long since ceased to be a case to answer, either way. I was wrong.

  Following the 2005 ruling, the Discovery Institute has had to adopt a more subtle strategy. It no longer seeks to require that intelligent design be taught in science class. Instead it attempts to ensure that evolution is presented as a scientific theory that can (and no doubt should) be critically examined and challenged. This is laudable, and very much part of the scientific process, although it would be unusual for high school students to be taught to question and challenge everything they were told in class. Science progresses because we are able to ‘bank’ some scientific truths — we can accept them as valid and move on. If we stopped to question everything we think is scientifically true, then we wouldn’t make much progress.

  But the institute also suggests that there is nothing unconstitutional in teachers ‘discussing’ (rather than formally teaching) the ‘scientific theory of design’. It encourages such discussion, under the guise of academic freedom. So, the only way to prevent an insidious creeping of creationism into school science discussions is, once again, to be clear that intelligent design is not science. It belongs instead in a philosophy or theology class.

  And this is why I find the strong anthropic principle deeply worrying. By its very nature, it is intended as a counterpoint to the Copernican Principle. It therefore undermines the very basis of science as it has been practised over the last five hundred years. It is surely a gift to those who, like the members of the Discovery Institute, seek to promote discussion of intelligent design as a valid ‘scientific’ theory.

  The science historian Helge Kragh voiced similar concerns almost a quarter of a century ago. In his review of Barrow and Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle he commented:

  Under cover of the authority of science and hundreds of references Barrow and Tipler, in parts of their work, contribute to a questionable, though fashionable mysticism of the social and spiritual consequences of modern science. This kind of escapist physics, also cultivated by authors like Wheeler, Sagan and Dyson, appeals to the religious instinct of man in a scientific age. Whatever its merits it should not be accepted uncritically or because of the scientific brilliancy of its proponents.8

  Writing in 2011, Kragh noted:

  I was convinced that within a decade physicists would lose interest in anthropic considerations and leave them to where they properly belonged, namely to philosophers and theologians. I was seriously wrong.9

  The John Templeton Foundation

  The feelings of discomfort generated by the strong anthropic principle remind us that modern theoretical physics has drifted far from its notional purpose: to provide an interpretation of the physical world that we can understand and accept as scientifically true.

  To a certain extent, physical theorists have always tended to sail close to the wind and wax rather speculatively, philosophically or even theologically at times. It comes with the territory. The subject is after all concerned with the ‘big questions’, and in the absence of hard scientific evidence, there’s nothing in principle wrong with a few personal opinions.

  But the relationship between science and religion rema
ins uneasy and is sometimes antagonistic, as evidenced by the Dover School case. Most scientists accept that there are fundamental questions of purpose, existence and meaning that science cannot pretend to provide answers for. These are questions that should be dismissed as irrelevant non-questions, or else the answers should be sought from some system of belief that is not scientifically based.

  Despite this unease, many contemporary theorists have comfortably set up camp in the space where science meets philosophy meets theology. Some of these theorists have written popular books, using the ‘authority of science’, as Kragh puts it, to advance their own personal world views. Many of these are great books (I have them on my shelves), and reading them as a graduate and subsequently postgraduate student inspired me eventually to try my own hand at writing about science.

  But it is important to be aware of these authors’ likely agendas. I don’t mean to suggest that these agendas might be in some way hidden, or that there’s some grand conspiracy in play. What I mean is that when we read the next best-selling popular science book, we might be interested in understanding roughly where the author has set up camp.

  The John Templeton Foundation was established by Sir John Templeton in 1987, with an endowment valued in 2011 at $2.3 billion. Templeton, an American-born British investor and philanthropist, died in 2008, aged 95. The foundation is overtly religious or theological in nature, but through the award of annual prizes and grants, it supports science and invests in research on the ‘big questions’. Templeton’s philanthropic vision includes the following observations:

  There may be significant promise in supporting a wide range of careful and rigorous research projects by well-regarded scientists on basic areas with theological relevance and potential … to examine or foster the idea that through an expanded search for more knowledge, in which we are open-minded and willing to experiment, theology may produce positive results even more amazing than the discoveries of scientists that have electrified the world … in the 20th century.10

  The Templeton Prize is now valued at £ 1 million.* Recipients have included religious figures (the Dalai Lama was awarded the prize in 2012), but also many physicists — Stanley Jaki (1987), Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1989), Paul Davies (1995), Freeman Dyson (2000), John Polkinghorne (2002), George Ellis (2004), Charles Townes (2005), John Barrow (2006), Bernard d’Espagnat (2009) and Martin Rees (2011).

  Some of these Templeton prize laureates either work at the intersection of physics and theology or have feet in both camps, as it were. Jaki was an astrophysicist and Benedictine priest (he died in 2009). Polkinghorne is a mathematical physicist and Anglican priest. Ellis is a South African cosmologist and active Quaker, and in the 1970s and 1980s was a vigorous opponent of apartheid.

  It should come as no surprise that the Templeton Foundation would seek to recognize and reward those scientists who have reconciled their science with their religious beliefs and who have contributed to the development of what Templeton himself referred to as ‘new spiritual information’. But what about the others?

  Both Davies and Barrow are very successful popular science writers. In books such as Other Worlds, God and the New Physics and The Goldilocks Enigma, Davies has made no secret of his particular world view. Thus, in The Goldilocks Enigma, he writes:

  Many scientists will criticize my … inclinations towards [theories in which the universe is purposefully driven to develop life and mind and in which life and mind somehow ‘create’ the universe in a closed causal loop] as being crypto-religious. The fact that I take the human mind and our extraordinary ability to understand the world through science and mathematics as a fact of fundamental significance betrays, they will claim, a nostalgia for a theistic world view in which humankind occupies a special place. And this even though I do not believe Homo sapiens to be more than an accidental by-product of haphazard natural processes. Yet I do believe that life and mind are etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy, half-glimpsed life principle, and if I am honest I have to concede that this starting point is something I feel more in my heart than in my head. So maybe that is religious conviction of sorts.11

  Barrow was awarded the Templeton Prize in recognition of his contributions to debates on spirituality and the purpose of life. The ‘chronicle’ issued by the foundation at the time of his award makes special mention of his role as co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle:

  This book has been enormously influential in discussions between religious and scientific perspectives on the universe. It has been cited very heavily across the spectrum of scholarly study from studies of natural theology, philosophy, physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Of particular interest to the theology—science interface is the detailed history of design arguments and natural theology, to which Dr Barrow contributed with the modern cosmological forms of the anthropic principle.12

  The award of the 2011 prize to Martin Rees caused something of a stir. Rees declares that he has no religious beliefs at all, but maintains an appreciation of the culture of the Anglican church. He is an irregular churchgoer and, in his own words, is not ‘allergic to religion’. Rees has had a highly illustrious career, but appears to have made no overt contribution to ‘new spiritual information’ in areas of theological relevance. But this is not quite how the Templeton Foundation saw it. According to the press release issued at the time of the award announcement, ‘By peering into the farthest reaches of the galaxies, Martin Rees has opened a window on our very humanity, inviting everyone to wrestle with the most fundamental questions of our nature and existence.’13

  Now, it is quite possible to peer into the farthest reaches of the galaxies without making any pronouncements on fundamental questions of our nature and existence, and many similarly illustrious astrophysicists have done just this. It is no doubt Rees’s work on ‘cosmic coincidences’ and his leaning towards anthropic reasoning that made his candidacy appear attractive to the foundation. In his recommendation, Robert Williams, president of the International Astronomical Union, noted that Rees ‘is very unusual in that he constantly touches on spiritual themes without dealing explicitly with religion’.14

  So, what’s my point? I want to be clear that I have no real problem with the activities of the Templeton Foundation. It appears to be a lot less insidious than the Discovery Institute (although not all commentators agree) and it funds some excellent work in theoretical physics and philosophy. Rees himself declared: ‘They are very nice people who are doing things which are within their agenda.’15

  There are of course issues with how acceptance of such an award by an eminent scientist is perceived — Rees is a former president of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal. Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, no friend of the Templeton Foundation, pointed out that the award would look a lot better on Templeton’s CV than it would on Rees’s.*

  Genuine altruism is very hard to find, and all funding bodies seek to drive an agenda of some kind. The Templeton Foundation certainly doesn’t attempt to influence the nature and outcomes of the research that it funds. But by actively promoting scientific and philosophical debate on subjects of ‘spiritual’ or theological relevance, it does raise the profile of these subjects and gives them a prominence that they may not necessarily deserve.**

  My concern is only that we should always try to be aware of what we’re dealing with. Theoretical physics is in part concerned with the ‘big questions’. This is what makes it fascinating. But most theoretical physicists are complete human beings — they are interested in things and believe things that often draw them beyond the boundaries of even a loosely defined scientific method. They want to talk and write about these things, to contribute to a broader dialogue relevant to our human concerns, in ways that some — like the Templeton Foundation — perceive as ‘spiritual’.

  In this way theorists add to our cultural richness. But these are very murky waters, and we should wade into them with eyes wide open. The line between use and abuse of t
he ‘authority of science’ to promote a particular outlook (on life, the universe and everything) is extremely thin.

  The reality check

  In his 2002 book Anthropic Bias, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom commented that:

  The ‘anthropoid principles’ are multitudinous — I have counted over thirty in the literature. They can be divided into three categories: those that express a purported observation selection effect, those that state some speculative empirical hypothesis, and those that are too muddled or ambiguous to make any clear sense at all.16

  I don’t think we need to waste time debating whether the strong anthropic principle, or indeed any similarly structured principle, is scientific. Any structure designed completely to overturn the Copernican Principle and restore some kind of privileged status to intelligent observers (whether human or not) goes against the grain of nearly five hundred years of scientific practice.

  Now, the success of past practice certainly doesn’t make this practice right, not least because the six Principles described in Chapter 1 leave plenty of room for manoeuvre and interpretation. But on the basis of the interpretation I have given and used throughout this book, I would conclude that the strong anthropic principle is not science.

  This leaves us to consider the weak form of the principle. Should we deem this to be scientific? Can the weak anthropic principle be used to make testable predictions? How should we interpret the use of the principle in the context of the multiverse?

  Time for a final reality check.

  Although there are many claims for predictions made on the basis of anthropic reasoning, there are two examples that stand out. These are the ‘carbon coincidence’, which led to Hoyle’s prediction of a carbon resonance at 7.7 MeV; and a prediction concerning the magnitude of the cosmological constant made by Steven Weinberg in 1987. The former example is outlined above, so let’s quickly back-fill on the latter.