Mick Hartley

In the NYT physicist Paul Davies claims not to see the difference between science and religion:

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

If the universe was indeed a “meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed” not only could you not be a scientist; you couldn’t be anything. It’s a thought experiment not worth wasting any time on, just as it would be to imagine a universe where the value of pi depended on the colour of your socks. It’s not a leap of faith to believe in an orderly universe: it’s the way it is.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

These are not scientific questions. In fact it’s difficult to imagine quite what form an answer might take – though it’s not hard to see which way this is headed.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

This is nonsense. Scientific explanations work because they’ve been tested empirically. If they don’t match up, they’re discarded. That’s the way the world is, and that’s the way science is. There’s nothing in science that supplies reasons for things being the way they are. That’s not what science is about. It makes no sense, for instance, to ask why the value of pi is what it is. Or at least it’s no part of science. Queries like that, about the reasons for things being the way they are, are smuggled in from another “magisterium” – from religion. So Davies is asking a religious question of science, and then when he fails to get the answer he wants, makes out he’s uncovered some profound flaw in the whole scientific enterprise. Because, at bottom, when people start asking questions about the reasons for things being the way they are, the only answer that’s going to make them happy is one invoking some God or other. Or – and this is where Davies is leading us – to some kind of anthropic principle.

Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.

Yes, as it happens Davies has recently published a book on this very subject: “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life“. It’s a follow-up to his “The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning“. He likes bringing God into it, doesn’t he?

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

Historically there’s certainly a strong case for arguing that science grew out of the notion of God’s laws, but it’s absurd to conclude from this that it can never be anything more than theology.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

It’s not “appealing to an external agency” to propose and develop scientific laws. This is just a cheap piece of sophistry. Evolution, say: that doesn’t appeal to an external agency. It’s the whole point of it. To compare, say, a creationist account of the development of life on earth with a Darwinian account because one depends on the external agency of a creator while the other depends on the external agency of a theory….it’s nonsense. The theory isn’t some externality. It’s an explanation. It’s such a basic point it’s hard to believe he can pretend not to see it.

I’ve read very little about the anthropic principle, on the grounds that although it may be interesting in theory, really it’s so speculative that there’s not much useful to be said. This article certainly does nothing to make me think I’m missing out. What it does do is increase my suspicion that at the back of all these anthropic speculations is that old religious impulse, and that this is all just another way of pretending that science should be more like religion, when really the important thing about science is that it isn’t like religion.