The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (54 page)

In more recent times, other astronomical phenomena have occurred unexpectedly and could not be immediately understood. These include pulsars, supernovas, quasars, and gamma-ray bursts. But, as with other examples, these phenomena eventually repeated in one way or another, in time or in space. This allowed us to learn enough to eventually understand their nature in purely physical terms.

At no time and at no place in the sky have we run across an event above the noise that did not repeat sometime or someplace and could not be accounted for in terms of established natural science. We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that requires a supernatural element o be added to a model in order to describe the event. In fact, we have no cosmic phenomenon that meets the Swinburne criterion for a miracle. A God who plays a sufficiently active role to produce miraculous events in the cosmos has not been even glimpsed at by our best astronomical instruments to date. Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.

Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?

We have seen that the origin and the operation of the universe do not require any violations of laws of physics. This probably will come as a surprise to the layperson who may have heard otherwise from the pulpit or the media. However, the scientifically savvy believer might concede this point for the sake of argument and then retort, “Okay, then where did the laws of physics come from?” The common belief is that they had to come from somewhere outside the universe. But that is not a demonstrable fact. There is no reason why the laws of physics cannot have come from within the universe itself.

Physicists invent mathematical models to describe their observations of the world. These models contain certain general principles that have been traditionally called “laws” because of the common belief that these are rules that actually govern the universe the way civil laws govern nations. However, as I showed in my previous book,
The Comprehensible Cosmos,
the most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behavior of matter. Rather they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior.
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In order for any principle of nature we write down to be objective and universal, it must be formulated in such a way that it does not depend on the point of view of any particular observer. The principle must be true for all points of view, from every “frame of reference.” And so, for example, no objective law can depend on a special moment in time or a position in space that may be singled out by some preferred observer.

Suppose I were to formulate a law that said that all objects move naturally toward me. That would not be very objective. But this was precisely what people once thought—that Earth was the center of the universe and the natural motion of bodies was toward Earth. The Copernican revolution showed this was wrong and was the first step in the gradual realization of scientists that their laws must not depend on frame of reference.

In 1918 mathematician Emmy Noether proved that the most important physical laws of all—conservation of energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum—will automatically appear in any model that does not single out a special moment in time, position in space, and direction in space.
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Later it was realized that Einstein’s special theory of relativity follows if we do not single out any special direction in four-dimensional space-time.

These properties of space-time are called
symmetries.
For example, the rotational symmetry of a sphere is a result of the sphere singling out no particular direction in space. The four space-time symmetries described above are just the natural symmetries of a universe with no matter, that is, a void. They are just what they should be if the universe appeared from an initial state in which there was no matter—from nothing.

Other laws of physics, such as conservation of electric charge and the various force laws, arise from the generalization of space-time symmetries to the abstract spaces physicists use in their mathematic models. This generalization is called
gauge invariance,
which is likened to a principle I more descriptively refer to as
point-of-view invariance.

The mathematical formulations of these models (which are provided in
The Comprehensible Cosmos)
must reflect this requirement if they are to be objective and universal. Surprisingly, when this is done, most of the familiar laws of physics appear naturally. Those that are not immediately obvious can be seen to plausibly arise by a process, known as
spontaneous symmetry breaking.

So where did the laws of physics come from? They came from nothing! Most are statements composed by humans that follow from the symmetries of the void out of which the universe spontaneously arose. Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere. And this is why, for example, a violation of energy conservation at the beginning of the big bang would be evidence for some external creator. Even though they invented it, physicists could not simply change the “law.” It would imply a miracle or, more explicitly, some external agency that acted to break the time symmetry that leads to conservation of energy. But, as we have seen, no such miracle is required by the data.

Thus we are justified in applying the conservation laws to the beginning of the big bang at the Planck time. At that time, as we saw earlier in this chapter, the universe had no structure. That meant that it had no distinguishable place, direction, or time. In such a situation, the conservation laws apply.

Now, this is certainly not a commonly understood view. Normally we think of laws of physics as part of the structure of the universe. But here I am arguing that the three great conservation laws are not part of any structure. Rather they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment.

No doubt this concept is difficult to grasp. My views on this particular issue are not recognized by a consensus of physicists, although I insist that the science I have used is well established and conventional. I am proposing no new physics or cosmology but merely providing an interpretation of established knowledge in those fields as it bears on the question of the origin of physical law, a question few physicists ever ponder.

I must emphasize another important point, which has been frequently misunderstood. I am not suggesting that the laws of physics can be anything we want them to be, that they are merely “cultural narratives,” as has been suggested by authors associated with the movement called postmodernism.
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They are what they are because they agree with the data.

Whether or not you will buy into my account of the origin of physical law, I hope you will allow that I have at minimum provided a plausible natural scenario for a gap in scientific knowledge, that gap being a clear consensus on the origin of physical law. Once again, I do not have the burden of proving this scenario. The believer who wishes to argue that God is the source of physical law has the burden of proving (1) that my account is wrong, (2) that no other natural account is possible, and (3) that God did it.

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

If the laws of physics follow naturally from empty space-time, then where did that empty space-time come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? This question is often the last recourse of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from physics and cosmology and finds that all his other arguments fail. Philosopher Bede Rundle calls it “philosophy’s central, and most perplexing, question.” His simple (but book-length) answer: “There has to be something.”
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Clearly many conceptual problems are associated with this question. How do we def ne “nothing”? What are its properties? If it has properties, doesn’t that make it something? The theist claims that God is the answer. But, then, why is there God rather than nothing? Assuming we can define “nothing,” why should nothing be a more natural state of affairs than something? In fact, we can give a plausible scientific reason based on our best current knowledge of physics and cosmology that something is more natural than nothing!

In Chapter 2 we saw how nature is capable of building complex structures by processes of self-organization, how simplicity begets complexity. Consider the example of the snowflake, the beautiful six-pointed pattern of ice crystals that results from the direct freezing of water vapor in the atmosphere. Our experience tells us that a snowflake is very ephemeral, melting quickly into drops of liquid water that exhibit far less structure. But that is only because we live in a relatively high-temperature environment, where heat reduces the fragile arrangement of crystals to a simpler liquid. Energy is required to break the symmetry of a snowflake.

In an environment where the ambient temperature is well below the melting point of ice, as it is in most of the universe far from the highly localized effects of stellar heating, any water vapor would readily crystallize into complex, asymmetric structures. Snowflakes would be eternal, or at least would remain intact until cosmic rays tore them apart.

This example illustrates that many simple systems of particles are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we cannot expect it to be very stable. It would likely undergo a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent. As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”
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In the nonboundary scenario for the natural origin of the universe I mentioned earlier, the probability for there being something rather than nothing actually can be calculated; it is over 60 percent.
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In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention—not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.

Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain

scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling “God” some

vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they

pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride

themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God,

although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and

no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine.

—S
IGMUND
F
REUD
,
T
HE
F
UTURE OF AN
I
LLUSION

How do I define religion? It doesn’t matter
just
how I define it, since I plan to examine and discuss the neighboring phenomena that (probably) aren’t religions—spirituality, commitment to secular organizations, fanatical devotion to ethnic groups (or sports teams), superstition…. So, wherever I “draw the line,” I’ll be going over the line in any case. As you will see, what we usually call religions are composed of a variety of quite different phenomena, arising from different circumstances and having different implications, forming a loose family of phenomena, not a “natural kind” like a chemical element or a species.

What is the essence of religion? This question should be considered askance. Even if there is a deep and important affinity between many or even most of the world’s religions, there are sure to be variants that share some typical features while lacking one or another “essential” feature. As evolutionary biology advanced during the last century, we gradually came to appreciate the deep reasons for grouping living things the way we do—sponges are animals, and birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than frogs are—and new surprises are still being discovered every year. So we should expect—and tolerate—some difficulty in arriving at a counterexample-proof definition of something as diverse and complex as religion. Sharks and dolphins look very much alike and behave in many similar ways, but they are not the same sort of thing at all.
Perhaps,
once we understand the whole field better, we will see that Buddhism and Islam, for all their similarities, deserve to be considered two entirely different species of cultural phenomenon. We can start with common sense and tradition and consider them both to be religions, but we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the prospect that our initial sorting may have to be adjusted as we learn more. Why is
suckling one’s young
more fundamental than
living in the ocean
? Why is
having a backbone
more fundamental than
having wings
? It may be obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious at the dawn of biology.

In the United Kingdom, the law regarding cruelty to animals draws an important moral line at whether the animal is a vertebrate: as far as the law is concerned, you may do what you like to a live worm or fly or shrimp, but not to a live bird or frog or mouse. It’s a pretty good place to draw the line, but laws can be amended, and this one was. Cephalopods—octopus, squid, cuttlefish—were recently made
honorary vertebrates,
in effect, because they, unlike their close mollusc cousins the clams and oysters, have such strikingly sophisticated nervous systems. This seems to me a wise political adjustment, since the similarities that mattered to the law and morality didn’t line up perfectly with the deep principles of biology.

We may find that drawing a boundary between
religion
and its nearest neighbors among cultural phenomena is beset with similar, but more vexing, problems. For instance, since the law (in the United States, at least) singles out religions for special status, declaring something that has been regarded as a religion to be really something else is bound to be of more than academic interest to those involved. Wicca (witchcraft) and other New Age phenomena have been championed as religions by their adherents precisely in order to elevate them to the legal and social status that religions have traditionally enjoyed. And, coming from the other direction, there are those who have claimed that evolutionary biology is really “just another religion,” and hence its doctrines have no place in the public-school curriculum. Legal protection, honor, prestige, and a
traditional exemption from certain sorts of analysis and criticism
—a great deal hinges on how we define religion. How should I handle this delicate issue?

Tentatively, I propose to define religions as
social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
This is, of course, a circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion without
God
or
gods
is like a vertebrate without a backbone. Some of the reasons for this roundabout language are fairly obvious; others will emerge over time—and the definition is subject to revision, a place to start, not something carved in stone to be defended to the death. According to this definition, a devout Elvis Presley fan club is not a religion, because, although the members may, in a fairly obvious sense,
worship
Elvis, he is not deemed by them to be literally supernatural, but just to have been a particularly superb human being. (And if some fan clubs decide that Elvis is truly immortal and divine, then they are indeed on the way to starting a new religion.) A supernatural agent need not be very
anthropomorphic.
The Old Testament Jehovah is definitely a sort of divine man (not a woman), who sees with eyes and hears with ears—and talks and acts in real time. (God
waited
to
see
what Job would do, and
then
he
spoke
to him.) Many contemporary Christians, Jews, and Muslims insist that God, or Allah, being omniscient, has no need for anything like sense organs, and, being eternal, does not act in real time. This is puzzling, since many of them continue to pray to God, to hope that God
will
answer their prayers tomorrow, to express gratitude to God for
creating
the universe, and to use such locutions as “what God intends us to do” and “God have mercy,” acts that
seem
to be in flat contradiction to their insistence that their God is not at all anthropomorphic. According to a long-standing tradition, this tension between God as agent and God as eternal and immutable Being is one of those things that are simply beyond human comprehension, and it would be foolish and arrogant to try to understand it. That is as it may be, and this topic will be carefully treated later in the book, but we cannot proceed with my definition of religion (or any other definition, really) until we (tentatively, pending further illumination) get a
little
clearer about the spectrum of views that are discernible through this pious fog of modest incomprehension. We need to seek further interpretation before we can decide how to classify the doctrines these people espouse.

For some people, prayer is not literally
talking to God
but, rather, a “symbolic” activity, a way of talking to
oneself
about one’s deepest concerns, expressed metaphorically. It is rather like beginning a diary entry with “Dear Diary.” If what they call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can
answer
prayers,
approve
and
disapprove, receive
sacrifices, and
mete out
punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this Being God, and stand in awe of it (not
Him),
their creed, whatever it is, is not really a religion according to my definition. It is, perhaps, a wonderful (or terrible) surrogate for religion, or a
former
religion, an offspring of a genuine religion that bears many family resemblances to religion, but it is another species altogether. In order to get clear about what religions
are,
we will have to allow that some religions may have turned into things that aren’t religions anymore. This has certainly happened to particular practices and traditions that used to be parts of genuine religions. The rituals of Halloween are no longer religious rituals, at least in America. The people who go to great effort and expense to participate in them are not, thereby, practicing religion, even though their activities can be placed in a clear line of descent from religious practices. Belief in Santa Claus has also lost its status as a religious belief.

For others, prayer really is talking to God, who (not
which)
really does listen, and forgive. Their creed is a religion, according to my definition, provided that they are part of a larger social system or community, not a congregation of one. In this regard, my definition is profoundly at odds with that of William James, who defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (1902, Chapter 5). He would have no difficulty identifying a lone believer as a person with a religion; he himself was apparently such a one. This concentration on individual, private religious
experience
was a tactical choice for James; he thought that the creeds, rituals, trappings, and political hierarchies of “organized” religion were a distraction from the root phenomenon, and his tactical path bore wonderful fruit, but he could hardly deny that those social and cultural factors hugely affect the content and structure of the individual’s experience. Today, there are reasons for trading in James’s psychological microscope for a wide-angle biological and social telescope, looking at the factors, over large expanses of both space and time, that shape the experiences and actions of individual religious people.

But just as James could hardly deny the social and cultural factors, I could hardly deny the existence of individuals who very sincerely and devoutly take themselves to be the lone communicants of what we might call private religions. Typically these people have had considerable experience with one or more world religions and have chosen not to be joiners. Not wanting to ignore them, but needing to distinguish them from the much, much more typical religious people who identify themselves with a particular creed or church that has many other members, I shall call them
spiritual
people, but not
religious.
They are, if you like, honorary vertebrates.

There are many other variants to be considered in due course—for instance, people who pray, and believe in the efficacy of prayer, but don’t believe that this efficacy is channeled through an agent God who literally hears the prayer. I want to postpone consideration of all these issues until we have a clearer sense of where these doctrines sprang from. The core phenomenon of religion, I am proposing, invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way participants think about what they ought to do. I use the evasive word “invokes” here because, as we shall see in a later chapter, the standard word “belief” tends to distort and camouflage some of the most interesting features of religion. To put it provocatively, religious belief isn’t always
belief.
And why is the approval of the supernatural agent or agents to be sought? That clause is included to distinguish religion from “black magic” of various sorts. There are people—very few, actually, although juicy urban legends about “satanic cults” would have us think otherwise—who take themselves to be able to command demons with whom they form some sort of unholy alliance. These (barely existent) social systems are on the boundary with religion, but I think it is appropriate to leave them out, since our intuitions recoil at the idea that people who engage in this kind of tripe deserve the special status of the devout. What apparently grounds the widespread respect in which religions of all kinds are held is the sense that those who are religious are well-intentioned, trying to lead morally good lives, earnest in their desire not to do evil, and to make amends for their transgressions. Somebody who is both so selfish and so gullible as to try to make a pact with evil supernatural agents in order to get his way in the world lives in a comic-book world of superstition and deserves no such respect.