Science Vs God
The Everlasting Religion-Science duel
“If I were to define God, I’d define it as the human inability to explain certain phenomena,” Nidhish Sahni(me)
In Viking mythology, Skoll and Hari chase the sun and the moon. When the wolves catch either one, there is an eclipse. There are similar myths in other cultures. Now obviously, the ancients didn’t know what caused eclipses but they did notice patterns in their occurrence. These patterns, once grasped, made it clear that eclipses were not dependent on the arbitrary whims of supernatural beings, but are rather governed by certain laws.
Viewed on the timeline of human history, scientific inquiry is a very new endeavour. Most events in nature which appeared to our ancestors were impossible to predict. Volcanoes, earthquakes, storms etc all seemed to occur without obvious cause or pattern. Hence, it was natural for them to ascribe the violent acts of nature to mischievous deities. Calamities were often taken as a sign that we had somehow offended the gods. The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves.
Ignorance of nature’s ways led people to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun and the earth; of the oceans and rivers ; even of earthquakes and volcanoes. When the gods were pleased , mankind was treated to good weather, peace and freedom. When they were displeased, there came drought, floods and war. The connection of cause and effect in nature was invisible to everyone’s eyes. However this idea slowly began to change…not by a miracle…but with Thales of Miletus
The Birth of Early Science
Thales was a very shadowy figure with barely any writings left behind of his own. About 2600 years ago (a little before 500 BC), he developed the idea that the world can be deciphered, and nature follows consistent principles that can be understood and explained without resorting to mythical explanations. Thales was one of the Ionians, who are credited with uncovering fundamental laws to explain natural phenomena. They had a very rational approach and led to conclusions surprisingly similar to what our modern and more sophisticated methods have led us to believe today. The first mathematical formula was given by an Ionian named Pythagoras (extremely popular for his Pythagorean Theorem). Archimedes, a very eminent physicist, provided us with 3 physical laws: The law of the lever, the law of buoyancy and the law of reflection. Obviously, he did not call them laws and explained them with observation and measurement. Instead, he treated them as pure mathematical axioms (The ones you study in your school textbooks).
However this view of the Ionians-that nature can be explained through general laws and reduced to a simpler set of principles-exerted a powerful influence for only a few centuries. Ionian theories seemed to have no place for free will, or the concept that gods intervene in the workings of the world. This was as profoundly unsettling to many Greek thinkers as they are to many people today. If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing them that they are made of inanimate objects (atoms). Aristotle too rejected the concept of atoms because he couldn’t just accept that human beings were made of soulless objects. The Ionian idea that the universe is not human-centered was a milestone in our understanding of the cosmos, but this idea was dropped and wasn’t picked up again until Galileo, almost twenty centuries later.
Religion Dominates…
“It is clear that inanimate bodies reach their end not by chance but by intention…There is therefore, an intelligent personal being by whom everything in nature is ordered to its end,” Thomas Aquinas (Christian Philosopher). In the 13th century, people used this argument for the existence of god. Even as late as the 16th century, the great German astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that planets had sense perception and consciously followed movement that were grasped by their ‘mind’.
Similarly, the Greeks’ Christian successors rejected the idea that universe is governed by indifferent natural law. They also rejected the idea that humans do not hold a privileged place in the universe. If you carefully notice, all of them followed a common theme that universe is God’s dollhouse and hence, religion is a far worthier study than the phenomena of nature. In 1277, Pope John XXI published a list of 219 errors that were to be condemned. Among them was the idea that nature follows laws, because this conflicts with God’s omnipotence. (It is interesting to note that later, Pope John was killed by the effects of gravity when the roof of his palace fell in on him).
In this way, religion dominated over science for centuries. So how did we even arrive at the modern concept of laws of nature? How did science make a comeback? Well, the 17th century was a breakthrough for science. We talked about Kepler right? He obviously had an animistic view of physical objects but he seemed to have been the first one to at least have an understanding of the term ‘laws’ in the sense of modern science. Even Galileo did not use this term in most of his scientific works. So who formulated the concept of laws? Well, the credits go to Rene Descartes.
Science Makes a Comeback
Descartes was the first individual to rigorously formulate the concept of laws. He gave the precursors to Newton’s well known laws of motion. The three laws he gave explained physical phenomena in terms of collision of moving masses. He boldly asserted that these laws of nature were valid in all places at all times, and unlike Kepler, he explicitly stated that obeying these laws doesn’t imply that these bodies have ‘minds’. To make predictions, he understood the importance of what we call today ‘initial conditions’. These conditions define the initial state of the system at a particular interval of time over which one seeks to make predictions. With the initial conditions specified, his laws determined how a system evolved over time. Now, Descartes wasn’t an atheist and tried to reconcile these laws with the concept of god. According to Descartes, God ordained these laws but had no choice in the laws because these were the only possible laws. He felt that once God set the world going he left it entirely alone.
A similar position was adopted by Isaac Newton. He won widespread acceptance of the modern concept of scientific laws with his laws of motion and his law of gravity accounting for the orbits of the earth, moon and other planets. In modern science, the laws of nature are usually phrased mathematically. They can be exact or approximate, but they must hold without exception- if not universally, then at least under a set of conditions. This is the reason why we still consider Newton’s laws to be laws because even though they need to be modified if objects are moving with velocities near the speed of light, for the conditions of the everyday world in which the speeds we encounter are far below light speed, these laws still hold.
The ‘WHY’ Questions
Einstein, in the 20th century, modified Newton’s law of gravity in his general theory of relativity. However, it was still a classical theory. The 1920s saw a new branch of science called quantum mechanics come into existence which was very different from our classical laws. Quantum mechanics tries to describe our universe on a microscopic scale. It helped in developing an understanding of the fundamental forces of nature. As of now, the Standard Model of Particle Physics tries to take into account 3 of the 4 fundamental forces of nature. Uniting the 4th force with the other 3 is a very different and complicated topic which would be discussed separately in a future article. What I want to infer from all this is that all these laws of nature tell us how the universe behaves, but fail to answer some why questions such as:
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Why do we exist?
- Why this particular set of laws and not some other?
Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a ‘God’ who chose to create the universe that way. Well, if the answer really is God, then the question is merely deflected to that of who created God. In this view, it is accepted that there is some entity that exists and needs no creator, and that entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of God. However, it is possible to answer the above questions purely within the realm of science without invoking any divine beings. From what we know of reality, if God does indeed exist, all he does is ‘play dice’.
Something from Nothing
One requirement any law of nature must satisfy is that the energy of an isolated body surrounded by empty space must be positive. Any set of laws that describe a continuous world like that of our own, must have a concept of energy, which is a conserved quantity, meaning it doesn’t change in time. This means the total energy of the universe must remain constant. This constant can be subtracted out by measuring the energy of any volume of space relative to that of the same volume of empty space, so we may as well call this constant- Zero.
If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? This question is the reason why the law of gravity must exist. Gravity is attractive, and hence the gravitational energy is negative i.e one has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound system. This negative energy can balance out the positive energy needed to create matter. It is important to note that gravitational energy can never become greater than the positive energy of the matter (if it does, the star will collapse into a black hole, which has positive energy). Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot appear out of nothing, but a whole universe can.
On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because the law of gravity exists, the universe can and will create create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists and why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to set the universe going.
As for the final question, why are the fundamental laws as we have described them?
Reality is REALLY NOT REAL
Our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, atoms, molecules and even universes. These mental concepts are the only reality that we can know. There is no model independent reality. This is called Model-Dependent Realism. The fundamental laws of the universe a goldfish from inside of an aquarium would have formed would have been very different from ours. This doesn’t mean the laws the goldfish forms are wrong. As long as the goldfish forms laws that are consistent with observation and prediction, they are valid.
Be it religion or science, humanity from the very beginning has aimed to search for a complete and consistent theory of the universe. The ultimate theory that we form has to be consistent and must predict finite results that can be measured by us.
We’ve seen why there must be a consistent law like gravity, and for the theory of gravity to predict finite quantities (unlike the theory of general relativity), the theory must have what is called super-symmetry between the forces of nature and the matter on which they act.
M-theory is the most general super symmetric theory of gravity. What does the ‘M’ stand for? Well, it stands for-Mysterious, Mighty, Monster, Mickey Mouse- anything that you’d like to call that sounds cool. As for what really is the M-theory, that part would be covered in a future article. If M-theory is finite, it will be a model of a universe (more like 10 to the power 500 universes) which creates itself.
We must be a part of this universe, because there is no consistent model. It’s not yet been experimentally verified, but the fact that we human beings-who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature-have been to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph. If M-theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search began by humans going more than 3000 years back.
Till then,
Stay curious!
