So I was thinkin ...
It’s logical to conclude that the question of whether or not some form of god exists in our universe is binary. Yes or no. Either a god exists and created the cosmos and everything in it, or there was no guidance involved in the creation of it or the maintaining of it. The idea of no god can be summed up into one word.
Chaos.
Here’s what Wikipedia said about chaos:
Chaos derives from the Greek Χάος and typically refers to unpredictability. In the metaphysical sense, it is the opposite of law and order: unrestrictive, both creative and destructive.
The opposite of law and order. Meaning there was no particular plan or directive that got the universe to where it is now. If that’s truly the case, then how could we exist in a universe with so many laws? Gravity, acceleration, velocity, there are so many universal constants in physics and chemistry that exist supposedly because of chaos.
I dunno. It just doesn’t add up to me. I keep reading that all scientists are atheists, but for some reason the more I learn about science the more the universe seems like some sort of hierarchy to me; like someones in control.
I mean, doesn’t that make sense?
posted by ciN @ Friday, March 17, 2006
15 comments
15 Comments:
No, it doesn't make sense, sorry. :)
Make sure you reread your own post before you read futher. My response is a little thick.
Chaos isn't the same as nothing. Nothing would be no gravity, no laws of physics, no anything. Only the absense of something.
Chaos is a word used to describe a form of change inside what does exist, undirected by what we know of as sentience. Chaos isn't possible without physics, and physics aren't contrived laws based on the subjective art of a greater mind. Rather, 'physics' is just a name placed on our measured limits of how things happen to work in our particular universe. Our categorization of the features of the existence we are a part of.
So within those happenstance limits of physics, chaos is the word used to describe the time forced changes that occur, within those physical limits, that don't conform to patterns we humans subjectively call order.
Star and solar system formation is quite orderly, yet it is a very simple and direct result of time/change + physics. We can watch it happen. No one sees a huge hand during the process, molding large balls of plantoid. And so, chaos can quite easily lead to order. Chaos doesn't require being 'non-orderly', it simply means undirected by sentience.
Everything we see around us is drastically more complex then the chaos we are used to seeing, the simple stereotype chaos. And instead of trying to understand how chaos could have spawned such an orderly surrounding, it is more easily explained away by creationists as the product of some greater mind.
(Sidenote: I find it odd that people don't seem to have a problem with the fact that this mind, which is even more complex than its creation, came from nothing or always existed, or whatever other construct of convenience has been adopted by said creationist, yet creation itself couldn't have).
Taking a new perspective on it is like taking a new perspective on winning the lottery. The chances of it happening are so small most people can't imagine it. However, the guy who gives the money out every week doesn't question it. It has to happen, and does happen, somewhere. With so many planets in so many solar systems in so many galaxies, there were lots (lots in the chaotic universe kinda way) of chances for chaos to spring what we see everyday.
That's how we know we won the great lottery of existence: we are here. The mathematical improbability was uncanny, but we are here. The concept of this being the work of God is considerably more unlikely and just confuses things further.
I took some time answering your comment because I wanted to make sure I said what I'm about to say correctly. I apologize, but judging by the … thickness of your comment, you took similar steps. Here goes.
You open (after making sure my core beliefs are fresh in my mind) by saying that chaos cannot exist without physics. For the record, I agree. You then go on to say that chaos is the term used to describe the time-forced changes that occur in our particular universe (within the laws of physics) that don’t conform to our biased views on order. This is also true, but incomplete. It’s worth mentioning the randomness involved in those changes. Chaos doesn’t care what changes are going on or how they occur, it’s happy as long as stuff is happening. Which leads me to your next point, the example about stars and solar systems.
One of the things you say in that paragraph is that chaos doesn’t require being non-orderly. To be honest, that statement is wholly untrue. That’s the very essence of chaos. Not order. And yes, as you say, chaos can lead to order, but it cannot create it and therefore in both the physical and metaphysical sense ‘order’ cannot be used to describe anything chaotic. Chaos is the thing that decides what molecules of hydrogen and helium floating in space are going to collide. It decides which ones are going to fly apart again, and which ones are going to stick together to form larger masses. Chaos doesn’t, however, decide on the law of gravity that got them moving in the first place. Chaos doesn’t decide that hot metal moving fast creates an electromagnetic field. It simply takes that knowledge, and as you said, using time as its weapon, forces change to happen within the laws of physics. Chaos is under physics, it is subject to it, and as we both agree, cannot possibly exist without it. With that said, how can you claim that physics was the result of chaos. How can these laws exist second to your mathematical improbability?
We’re not talking about randomness on a scale of the universe. This isn’t about making countless planets with random attributes so that maybe some of them will be capable of sustaining life. This is about the universe itself having the tools and conditions readily available for life to develop anywhere in it in general, who cares what planet things are on. This is about fundamentals of existence. That oxygen, and carbon and energy could have the potential to create life… anywhere. We’re talking about a universe tailor-made for life to develop (even if Earth is the only planet with life). Because according to chaos: physics, chemistry, and every other law or limit we put on our universe was decided completely at random in a few nanoseconds by… what? A big explosion? A big bang of matter and energy? Come on… You called that uncanny? It’s about as close to impossible as you can get without actually being impossible. You can argue the metaphysics behind it and say “it had to happen to someone.” But this isn’t a provincial lottery, where someone has to win. There were no rules that said the universe had to be created so that ice floats on water, or that heat makes molecules speed up, but it was, and take away the human factor fucking things up and the system is perfect. It’ll sustain itself indefinitely. Chaos can take clay and mould it into that perfect system. But where did it get the clay?
Your loose comparison of me to those bible thumping creationists… I’m not sure how to respond too. If I was trying to use faith to explain away things I can’t understand we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You find believing in a creator hard because it adds too much confusion, too much doubt to the picture of existence. Yet you’ll readily believe that a universe, or for our purposes, life exists because of random choices made by insentient forces continuously over the course of billions of years. I don’t think I’m the one fooling myself into believing something because I want it to be true. I only want to know the real truth, and like any scientific mind would, I’m dismissing the idea that we got here through disorder if for no other reason than the numbers. I don’t care if it’s possible or not, I can sit there until I’m 150 flipping a coin over and over. Heads or tails, it isn’t going to land on its side.
In re-reading my comment just now I came to the realization that you did however, prove something Terry. That God, whether he exists or not, cannot be proven one way or the other using logic, or physics, or any other limit we’ve identified thus far.
You did make me think. And doubt momentarily. I do that a lot when it comes to what I believe (I think all Catholics do actually). For a little while I thought, “What if I’m wrong?” Then I asked the same question about you. Then I asked it about Muslims, and Buddhists. What if we’re all wrong? I’ve been up all night thinking about that one.
The conclusion I came to pleased me. I realized it doesn’t matter who’s right. It doesn’t matter if any of us are. And I know people like Danny Glover have been saying that shit on TV for like 30 years now, freedom of worship and all that, and I’ve always agreed with it. But I think tonight for the first time it really hit home, and I understand what it means now.
A lot of atheists say that the church spends too much time trying to cram their beliefs in everybody’s faces. In my experience as well, the guy in the corner of the room who believes in God gets a supremely long rant about what bullshit that prick Jesus was, and how the church is just indoctrinating people, which usually leads to come jokes at religion’s expense. And to think they bothered me at one point.
Guy’s it really doesn’t matter. Why try to convert some one? If you convert them they no longer believe what they did, and because of that they’re no longer the person they were, no longer the person you were trying to convert to begin with. And really people, we have bigger fish to fry.
In the history of the world, religion seems to be the main reason behind pretty much every war we’ve fought, but please don’t blame that on religion. You know as well as I do that it was just the introduction of humans to the picture that started the wars. Hypocrites running off to war to defend a God who forbids killing. The reasons as always, purely human ones.
I won’t be posting anymore on the topic of God or religion. There’s more important matters to discuss, because regardless of which ethnic group is right (if any) we still have to live together and get along. Maybe that’s the one step we need to make before we’re a race to be proud of. Realizing that going to war over religion is the same as killing someone because they like blueberry pop-tarts more than the s’mores ones.
Read some chaos theory bud. One thing that modern science has learned is that basically anything that looks random probably has a lot of ordered behaviour contained in it - local order is in fact implicit within global chaos. The Chaos Theoretic construct of an "attractor" means that local order tends to dominate the signal in very visible ways, even if nothing more interesting than arithmetic and algebra is being used to generate that signal.
Nothing you just said takes away at all from anything I said. The calculations are still there. The numbers still don't add up.
You say that local order dominates a signal. That means that the whatever order is contained within the system effects the way chaos interacts with it. Of course thats true. That doesn't change what chaos is. Nor does it change anything I said about it. If chaos effects a system thats orderly, the results are probably going to be orderly. Duh.
Stop just trying to prove me wrong and think about what I'm saying.
Your question was whether it made sense that someone would be in control. The answer is no, in fact ordered behaviour is an INHERENT PROPERTY of anything which can be described mathematically. I'm not proving you wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that you are wrong.
"That means that the whatever order is contained within the system effects the way chaos interacts with it." - no.
Chaos itself, that is, the very basic mathematical property of randomness, gives rise to macro-scale order. You cannot predict exactly where the signal will end up, but the LIKELIHOOD of its exhibiting some type of order is nearly 100% on a long enough timeline. There does not need to be anything in control. This is one of the operating principles of modern complexity theory.
-mgb
I apologize. I didn't mean to come off as pretentious. I accept the possibility that I’m wrong. It just doesn’t seem likely to me. Like you said, chaos allows this sort of thing to happen nearly 100% of the time on a long enough timeline. But that makes it seem like those fundamentals of existence I mentioned, like waters tendency to expand just before freezing were not always there, or not always to the degree they are now. It highly doubt the random characteristics the universe picked for itself at the beginning of the system would be the ones best suited for life. The chances are astronomical. So you’re implying that the universe (or chaos I guess) is changing, say for instance the laws of physics in really distant intervals. Or maybe slowly over time.
I suppose that lends itself to the whole big crunch thing, and another singularity, and then another universe with its own characteristics. But they don’t even know for sure if the universe is ever going to stop expanding and start to shrink yet.
It’s an acceptable theory. I’ll even accept that something along those lines happened. Or at least if we viewed it with our own eyes it would resemble that. Believing that something had to guide it does not make me any less correct than you. Without the idea of a big crunch, the universe simply did not have that long enough time line to create order or life. Even with the idea of a big crunch, the universe that was created this time was perfect. It was like getting a line of 4 million seven’s on the slot machine of the universe. Why is that more believable than the idea of guidance?
Because the guidance itself is totally unexplained. That's the entire nature of religious faith - positing something that's unexplained that explains everything else in the universe. Once someone has an acceptable theory on God's existence beyond "he/she/it exists", we might be able to actually discuss that point. Nobody, so far, does.
-mgb
Because the guidance itself is totally unexplained. That's the entire nature of religious faith.
I agree with that. But the nature of most scientific discovery is not proving something is the case. It's proving that something else is NOT the case. Yeah we have a rough explaination of what happened in the creation of the universe. (I won't get into the fact that they can't explain where the matter and energy came from, other than ... nowhere.) But it does not in any way refute guidance.
On that same token. Considering if I were correct, it would in no way refute the idea of the big bang.
I wasn't trying to use science to prove the existance of god, nor was I trying to disprove our current scientific theories, I was simply trying to unify them, into something I believe to be the way things had to have happened. We know the galaxies are moving apart, we know about all that static left over from the big bang. So we know something like that had to have happened. It's just too improbable to have happened by itself. And it seems to me that people are accepting that improbability just because its the only thing they can "sort of" explain. Sounds to me like that a prioi thing of seeing patterns in chaos simply because the human mind wants to.
I know that you're going to view what I just said as wrong. I know you're going to think I'm holding onto religion because I'm afraid of the concept that we really are on our own, and that dying really is ending. I wouldn't have too big a problem with it if it was the case, might take some getting used to, but I don't fear it. I just think about the explaination. I think about things you said, like "chaos exhibits some type of order on a long enough timeline."
Then I think about things like The Catcher in the Rye, and graffiti, movies, turbans, elephants. I think about Star Trek, and baby monitors, and fabric softener thats getting ever so softer with time. I think abut all the shit we're figuring out; The apex humanity is building towards. I think about how close we are to mastering fusion, and even interplanetary travel. The doors are still opening and we're only just getting started. I think about all that, and all the stuff we don't know. All the stuff out there that we'll prolly discover in a few centuries. And I try to look at it from your perspective and call it "some type of order." I try to tell myself that all this uncanniness came from ... nothing at all. Not even space ... nothing. And it all could have happened, or not happened, doesn't matter, the atoms decided.
I think about all that stuff. Constantly. Every time hotmail tells me Anonymous has left another comment on my blog. Every arguement you throw at me makes sense; makes me think. But I'll always come back to that. I've seen random. This isn't it. And - I suppose much the same way you feel - there is literally nothing anyone can say that will ever change that. Ever.
You say nothing as if is the only possible initial state. In actual fact, true nothingness is the least likely state possible, because it is literally a single state within an infinity of possibility. The likelihood of its ever having existed is basically zero. This is where generative theories of physics stand up: They recognize that the possible universe is the actual universe, and that there is a very real possibility that all of the possible existences factor into the state of the system. We have evidence to that effect. Nothing contributes no weight to any factor, so it does not show up in the equations.
Here's a thought experiment: Can we determine if Nothing is any part of that possibility system via a kind of passive detection? Like, the way that sonar detects the holes in the ambient noise background, can we detect the big gaping maw of nothingness as a hole in the signal? It's a worthwhile thought to consider, although it's very likely we'll never have the actual capability to measure that signal.
-mgb
I can't see us being able to measure nothing because we'll never find it. "Nothing" doesn't exist in our universe.
I think I understand what you're getting at with the generative theories. Sounds like the quantum eigenstate thing with the European guy who put the cat and the poison in a box, and said there was a point when it was both alive and dead. Like a qubit, needs to be measured before it'll collapse into one value temporarily. Infinite possibilities for events and even characteristics of a universe exist at all times and … well somehow they coalesce into one thing.
I’m confused though. That wouldn’t refute the big bang, and I don’t think that was your goal. What does that have to do with nothing? The big bang still would have had to happen in the reality we’re a part of, and that theory requires there being nothing before it, not even space to occupy.
There isn't a monolithic interpretation of the big bang anymore. Many physical theories posit that the observable universe in which we exist is part of a "larger" system - larger in the sense of we are contained within it, not larger in a spacial sense. Our universe is an expanding set of physical assimilations which pick up pieces of that system. There is no clear idea what the underlying system might look like, as it would not necessarily be governed by physics as we understand it. It may be that "In the Beginning", there was nothing more than an infinite expanse of un-governed quantum potential. It may also be that there was a God, of course. I just don't think that we have much evidence for the latter, whereas the former fits into at least the loose framework of what we can give evidence for :)
-mgb
With me it's a vantage point issue.
Picturing an old lady at a slot machine trying to get 4 million 7's in a row is setting yourself up for a thought experiment that's going to immediately blow your mind in favor of the God theory. But this is 'the known universe' we are talking about, so we could say there are 800 million slot machines constantly running, making the 4 million 7's in a row not just possible, but likely given the number of years everything has been bulling forward. The reality is a little mind blowing, but not as impossible as you make it sound.
You talk about 'conditions for life' like they are this single perfect set that was preordained. The ones we know of aren't overly special. There are a large number of sets of conditions that can spawn and support life, and maybe lots have occurred in other places. You used the line "the universe simply did not have that long enough time line to create order or life" but you say that without real understanding of chaos. I could get Yahtzee on my first roll. Just because it's unlikely doesn't mean it'll take a long time to happen, it could happen right away. That's the nature of randomness.
To explain softer bounce sheets, just look again at the idea of order in chaos. Like Mike said, chaos can't exist without pockets of order, and that order has consequences. In our case order lead to our solar system, and our planet being the correct distance from the sun for water to exist in its liquid state. That led to a weather cycle, lightening, various types of carbon molecules, a few rolls of the dice and ... life. VERY simple life, but still life.
That raises an old question. What is life? Bacteria is in the 'life' category but does a bacterium have a soul? Its just ordered atoms really. Hrm ... so nothing but atoms, but still life ... takes the mystery out of it, doesn't it. You said "the atoms decided" and said "I've seen random. This isn't it." But there's nothing overly complicated about the roots of life on earth. It didn't take much order of atoms to create the beginnings of life, at least not compared to what see (and are) today.
So yeah, consequences of order: the order that sprang in this pocket called Earth didn't just exist for a bit and fad again (maybe it did many times, but none of those occurrences endured). The order from which we came had one major consequence: it lead to further order.
Terry's new definition of 'life' (maybe I'm stealing, but it's new as far as I know): a type of order that tends toward greater ordering of its own kind of order.
If you run with that long enough you get softer bounce sheets.
Well, this was a long time coming, but here's my response.
Your definition of life is flawed because it leaves out, in my opinion the most important part of life, the thing that separates a virus from a block of carbon of equal size.
The important thing is the desire, or at least the instinct to stay alive. Even down so far as bacteria ... the very first bacteria on Earth for example. They were created and even if they were the most fundamental life possible, 10 seconds after they were made, after their birth from unorganized atoms, they knew how to make food through photosynthesis, and they did it. And they kept doing it until they couldn't do it anymore. (Even if only half of them did and the other half were too stupid and died.) It doesn't matter how simple life is... the fact that it belongs to the category of "life" means its infinitely more complex than matter. Infinitely more in that we still don’t know why they did it. Why they are still doing it. We understand the chemical processes, and biology but not much else.
Obviously nobody told them to do it… made them do it. They just did. So not only did everything fall into place flawlessly for life to be created, but whatever natural and unguided circumstances caused it to flourish, also were perfect to hardcode a will to survive into the DNA.
And something was constant… something that never changed at any point after and never stopped.
Do you see what I mean? I’m not just talking about the chemistry and biology it created … that’s possible. Super simple life… yeah I understand that part. But life isn’t simple in any way, especially in comparison to a grouping of atoms of the same size.
Honda not too long ago hooked a person up to an MRI machine and read their brainwaves as they were making some simple hand movements, they then got their lil Honda to make the same hand movements using nothing but the brainwaves from the MRI. We can do that now… the technology and understand is there.
A Japanese doctor also successfully grew a kidney in a lab from a few skin cells and gave it to a dying man… and it works. There’s some rejection, as in any transplant, but the man has a working kidney today … and he’s alive.
I just think the fact that we can do that now, understand it enough, and we’re comfortable enough with it, yet at the same time we don’t know why white blood cells try to keep you alive all the time. (They just do.) Is cause to make us think. Cause to make me think anyway…
If I was the atheist who subjected you to the "supremely long rant" from comment #3, then I must sincerely apologize :)
That's what happens when your religious debates are fueled with beer...
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