>It is still too early to tell whether there is some fundamental principle
>that can explain why the cosmological constant must be this small. But even
>if there is no such principle, recent developments in cosmology offer the
>possibility of an explanation of why the measured values of the
>cosmological constant and other physical constants are favorable for the
>appearance of intelligent life. According to the "chaotic inflation"
>theories of AndrÈ Linde and others, the expanding cloud of billions of
>galaxies that we call the big bang may be just one fragment of a much
>larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each one with
>different values for the fundamental constants.
>
>In any such picture, in which the universe contains many parts with
>different values for what we call the constants of nature, there would be
>no difficulty in understanding why these constants take values favorable to
>intelligent life. There would be a vast number of big bangs in which the
>constants of nature take values unfavorable for life, and many fewer where
>life is possible. You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain
>why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible: in
>all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question.
>[3] If any theory of this general type turns out to be correct, then to
>conclude that the constants of nature have been fine-tuned by a benevolent
>designer would be like saying, "Isn't it wonderful that God put us here on
>earth, where there's water and air and the surface gravity and temperature
>are so comfortable, rather than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto?"
>Where else in the solar system other than on earth could we have evolved?
>[3] The same conclusion may be reached in a more subtle way when quantum
>mechanics is applied to the whole universe. Through a reinterpretation of
>earlier work by Stephen Hawking, Sidney Coleman has shown how quantum
>mechanical effects can lead to a split of the history of the universe (more
>precisely, in what is called the wave function of the universe) into a huge
>number of separate possibilities, each one corresponding to a different set
>of fundamental constants. See Sidney Coleman, "Black Holes as Red Herrings:
>Topological fluctuations and the loss of quantum coherence," Nuclear
>Physics, Vol. B307 (1988), p. 867. (back)
>
>
>Reasoning like this is called "anthropic." Sometimes it just amounts to an
>assertion that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist,
>without further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than
>mystical mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number
>of worlds in which some constants take different values, then the anthropic
>
>explanation of why in our world they take values favorable for life is just
>common sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury
>or Pluto. The actual value of the cosmological constant, recently measured
>by observations of the motion of distant supernovas, is about what you
>would expect from this sort of argument: it is just about small enough so
>that it does not interfere much with the formation of galaxies. But we
>don't yet know enough about physics to tell whether there are different
>parts of the universe in which what are usually called the constants of
>physics really do take different values. This is not a hopeless question;
>we will be able to answer it when we know more about the quantum theory of
>gravitation than we do now.
>
>It would be evidence for a benevolent designer if life were better than
>could be expected on other grounds. To judge this, we should keep in mind
>that a certain capacity for pleasure would readily have evolved through
>natural selection, as an incentive to animals who need to eat and breed in
>order to pass on their genes. It may not be likely that natural selection
>on any one planet would produce animals who are fortunate enough to have
>the leisure and the ability to do science and think abstractly, but our
>sample of what is produced by evolution is very biased, by the fact that it
>is only in these fortunate cases that there is anyone thinking about cosmic
>design. Astronomers call this a selection effect.
>
>The universe is very large, and perhaps infinite, so it should be no
>surprise that, among the enormous number of planets that may support only
>unintelligent life and the still vaster number that cannot support life at
>all, there is some tiny fraction on which there are living beings who are
>capable of thinking about the universe, as we are doing here. A journalist
>who has been assigned to interview lottery winners may come to feel that
>some special providence has been at work on their behalf, but he should
>keep in mind the much larger number of lottery players whom he is not
>interviewing because they haven't won anything. Thus, to judge whether our
>lives show evidence for a benevolent designer, we have not only to ask
>whether life is better than would be expected in any case from what we know
>about natural selection, but we need also to take into account the bias
>introduced by the fact that it is we who are thinking about the problem.
>
>This is a question that you all will have to answer for yourselves. Being a
>physicist is no help with questions like this, so I have to speak from my
>own experience. My life has been remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper
>99.99 percentile of human happiness, but even so, I have seen a mother die
>painfully of cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's
>disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust.
>Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.
>
>The prevalence of evil and misery has always bothered those who believe in
>a benevolent and omnipotent God. Sometimes God is excused by pointing to
>the need for free will. Milton gives God this argument in Paradise Lost:
>
>I formed them free, and free they must remain
>Till they enthral themselves: I else must change
>Their nature, and revoke the high decree
>Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained
>Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall.
>
>It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an
>opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how
>does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for
>tumors?
>
>I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the
>universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence
>that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception
>that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides
>make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though
>they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us
>to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to
>sacrifice our children's lives at His orders, and the God of traditional
>Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in
>the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not
>supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem
>here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for
>signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?
>
>The issues that I have been asked to address here will seem to many to be
>terribly old-fashioned. The "argument from design" made by the English
>theologian William Paley is not on most peoples' minds these days. The
>prestige of religion seems today to derive from what people take to be its
>moral influence, rather than from what they may think has been its success
>in accounting for what we see in nature. Conversely, I have to admit that,
>although I really don't believe in a cosmic designer, the reason that I am
>taking the trouble to argue about it is that I think that on balance the
>moral influence of religion has been awful.
>
>This is much too big a question to be settled here. On one side, I could
>point out endless examples of the harm done by religious enthusiasm,
>through a long history of pogroms, crusades, and jihads. In our own century
>it was a Muslim zealot who killed Sadat, a Jewish zealot who killed Rabin,
>and a Hindu zealot who killed Gandhi. No one would say that Hitler was a
>Christian zealot, but it is hard to imagine Nazism taking the form it did
>without the foundation provided by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. On
>the other side, many admirers of religion would set countless examples of
>the good done by religion. For instance, in his recent book Imagined
>Worlds, the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson has emphasized the role
>of religious belief in the suppression of slavery. I'd like to comment
>briefly on this point, not to try to prove anything with one example but
>just to illustrate what I think about the moral influence of religion.
>
>It is certainly true that the campaign against slavery and the slave trade
>was greatly strengthened by devout Christians, including the Evangelical
>layman William Wilberforce in England and the Unitarian minister William
>Ellery Channing in America. But Christianity, like other great world
>religions, lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries, and slavery
>was endorsed in the New Testament. So what was different for anti-slavery
>Christians like Wilberforce and Channing? There had been no discovery of
>new sacred scriptures, and neither Wilberforce nor Channing claimed to have
>received any supernatural revelations. Rather, the eighteenth century had
>seen a widespread increase in rationality and humanitarianism that led
>othersófor instance, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Richard
>Brinsley Sheridanóalso to oppose slavery, on grounds having nothing to do
>with religion. Lord Mansfield, the author of the decision in Somersett's
>Case, which ended slavery in England (though not its colonies), was no more
>than conventionally religious, and his decision did not men-tion religious
>arguments. Although Wilberforce was the instigator of the campaign against
>the slave trade in the 1790s, this movement had essential support from many
>in Parliament like Fox and Pitt, who were not known for their piety. As far
>as I can tell, the moral tone of religion benefited more from the spirit of
>the times than the spirit of the times benefited from religion.
>
>Where religion did make a difference, it was more in support of slavery
>than in opposition to it. Arguments from scripture were used in Parliament
>to defend the slave trade. Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his
>condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious
>conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the
>children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good
>person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the
>legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri
>she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons
>preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good
>people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to
>do evilóthat takes religion.
>
>In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of
>Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive
>dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue
>between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the
>great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for
>intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for
>them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 04 2001 - 22:45:21 EDT