Beginnings, the flow of time, and cosmology

I am not a great mathematician. I am not a great physicist. I have learned a bit of both. However, I have a bit of fun reading cosmological theories.

Some people are wonderful at abstract conceptualization. I admire the founding figures of 20th century physics, the Schrodingers, Diracs and Einsteins. I do not have too much trouble at least starting to get my head round Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, and I understand the magnificence of their correlations with directly observed simple phenomena such as atomic spectra and time dilation.

However, Big Bang cosmology seems to require philosophical abstractions of such a degree that we have completely lost touch with everyday reality.

We conceptualize out from a zone of familiarity. Our zone of familiarity from birth entails 3 spatial dimensions and a consciousness that registers time as a dimensional one way arrow experienced as an infinitesimal 'position', our ever present instant. We draw back our every abstraction and equate it to this familiar framework.

Space Time expanded from a singularity, we are told. Where exactly was the singularity? What did space expand into? Expand is a term which assumes the existence of space. Time 'started'. Start is something that happens at a point in time. How can time start? What was there before time? What does before mean if there is no time?  

If my statements are meaningless, then so are these terms when used by cosmologists.

Bottom Line: The created cannot conceptualize the Eternal and Infinite.

Variables and Consciousness

'Variables' means something to most people. They are a concept, of course. I am going to use the terms 'variable, 'parameter' and 'concept' loosely and somewhat interchangeably here, because I cannot think of better words to explain myself. Variables are things we attach a, variable, value to. The value could be numerical, or it could be a description of how strongly an abstract variable like 'determination' is displayed by a person. We would say that a person displays 'limited' determination or 'strong' determination in achieving goals, for example. There are variables in maths, physics, chemistry. There are variables in economics. There are also less tangible, more subjective variables, belonging to spheres such as sociology, art, psychology, or morality. Examples? Virtue, evil, success, beauty.

Hitler's idea of evil was different from most non-Nazis. A Greenpeace member's idea of a virtuous or successful life might differ from that of an investment banker. 'Evil' and 'success' are subjective concepts and variables, in men's minds at least. But that is an aside. My point is that there are variables which have meaning for the human mind and are abstract rather than concise and concrete, like those of say physics.

Life is rich with variables,or parameters. Those variables associated with the physical, material framework of our existence, belong to the 'hard' sciences and mathematics. We are inclined to see these as having a reality even if there was no human or similar life. Things like spatial position, relative time, angular momentum, charge, quantum spin state, electrical resistance. All these would have existence, most would say, even if we were not present to observe and evaluate them.

However, as I said, there are also those variables associated with consciousness. Things like plausibility, accountability, attractiveness, approval. These are all variables by which humans measure other people or situations. It can be argued very strongly that these concepts are products of consciousness and have no meaning apart from the presence of conscious entities like man. They are relational variables (in the psychological sense of the phrase). We 'measure' them, or put a value on them, in order to evaluate people and circumstances. But they require consciousness, and a relational and emotional life, in order to have any meaning whatsoever. Yet we use these concepts, and attach values to them, quite routinely. 'Mary has a very plausible reason for not being able to attend next week' etc. The abstract concept here is of course 'plausibility'.

Some variables associated with consciousness relate to how positive life around us seems. Beauty, interest, pleasure are all things we seek. They have no concrete means of measurement, no consensus agreement on their values. Yet they are very important to us. 'I find Alan interesting'. 'Paris is the most beautiful city I have ever been to' etc etc.

Where do these variables come from? Did they evolve within us as simple chemical responses of the mind? This would be the position of most evolutionists and scientific reductionists.

If so, those variables have no meaning if you take conscious entities like us out of the picture. If there were no people or higher animals to experience these concepts, these concepts would vanish. They were not there until we were there.

If that is the case, you cannot invoke them to explain how we got here! Here I am looking at the line of evolutionary processes which supposedly produced conscious beings. I know evolution can take place in 'molecular machines', organisms with no consciousness (as far as we know); I'm not talking about that here. I'm talking about conscious struggles for survival. Think about this. It makes no sense for us to need 'fear of death' or 'will to survive' as being already there to explain how we gained 'life and consciousness'.

The need for survival springs from 'the will to live'. The will itself, and the sense of self or individuality, are abstract concepts or variables associated with conscious life. We have just called on an aspect of consciousness to describe how consciousness evolved.

This is clearly nonsense, yet evolution by natural selection hinges on it, when attempting to explain advanced life, using these types of argument  all the time. We retrospectively attribute conscious attributes to inanimate matter or extremely primitive organisations of matter to describe how it attained consciousness. The question, of course, is 'Which came first?':

Attribute of Consciousness OR Consciousness.

If you think the attributes of consciousness were already there in the background, before us, then Who possessed them and defined them 'in the beginning'??!!

Theory of Everything? Physics itself seems to have hit a limit

I love science. but I do not worship science. I have a BSc in Applied Physics with Electronics dating from the early 80's. I was taught physics in a pragmatic way; things that were solidly understood in context with a view to making engineers and scientists who could fabricate the next generation of electronic devices. I pursued a career in this arena for many years. I have been involved in the design of electronic circuits in areas such as telecommunications, aerospace and industrial test. I have some grasp on science, especially where it relates to engineering.

We humans like to control our environment and that means understanding it and modelling it. Beyond trying to understand other people, which can be problematic, it seems easier to predict the behaviour of the matter around us. (Yes, I know other people are also made of matter; that is another discussion!) Matter seems to be fairly predictable and we formalise this predictability into maths-based behavioural laws. This activity has progressed astonishingly well in recent centuries. The behaviour of liquids, solids and gases, electromagnetism, mechanics and electric circuit  elements, for example, has proceeded superbly. These areas continue to be refined and expanded. We can use aerodynamics and other disciplines to design multi-million dollar aircraft and they fly and behave much as expected.

However well-established physics still tends to look at reality in contextual nibbles. We identify a scenario and then choose a law. We want to understand how a radio wave travels from the Mars Rover. We choose Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's equations are nearly a couple of hundred years old, but they work just fine. Or we want to calculate the temperature rise of a solar boiler. We use thermodynamics. We may need other physics disciplines as well to refine our result, (such as GR for the Mars Rover) but the point is, we choose the best law for the context.

If we stretch our law too far, errors accumulate and we make mistakes. Our calculations no longer work well. We find the mistake by experimental data which doesn't agree with the law. Experimental verification with real world data is an essential part of science. Even Einstein's famous thought experiments needed verification. Einstein himself acknowledged this. However as the scientific enterprise attempts to progress further, it seems to be drifting more and more into unverifiable abstractions. Both Physics and Evolutionary Biology seem to be doing this. A thought experiment will do, never mind solid data and mathematical predictors. It is interesting that as scenarios get more and more complex, involving deep time and/or space, science as a whole is loosing it's firm handle on reality. Many would agree with me. Many are reluctant to say and do not want to be controversial or defeatist. Another human tendency; we like to uphold the credibility of our current enterprise. The Catholic Church used to be very guilty of this, but the issue is less the Catholic Church, more human nature at large. Again, another discussion there. But if we are not careful, science will fall to the very sort of deceptions it sought to remedy. Copernicus sought to remedy blind orthodoxy with evidence and mathematical models. These days a lot of big picture 'science' also makes do with little of either. Engineering as a discipline tends to address these problems fairly fast and close the program; real world results are needed soonish. But contemporary big picture science...?

Despite spectacular progress in recent centuries, and detailed progress in many areas in recent decades, I believe big picture science is stalling and increasingly bankrupt. Of course I could be proven wrong tomorrow, or next year, but I doubt it very much.

What do I mean?

Physics is stalled in a place where Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity cannot be reconciled into a general underlying theory. In some areas of cosmology there are QM and GR effects at play, so we have no model. Cosmology has many areas of huge uncertainty of understanding. As the scenarios increase in complexity, it also gets harder to obtain solidly relevant and accurate data. Both modelling and verification get more and more problematic until we just have to admit we do not really know and we don't have much lead. Suggestions to go beyond the reasonably-effective standard model of particle physics are stalled. More and more abstract concepts, with and without attendant maths, and always without empirical data, are springing up. Supersymmetry, string theory, m-branes, multiple-universes. It is amazing what you can convey with computer graphics and selective interviews and clever narrative, but hard facts in the traditional scientific sense tell another story.

I think our human ability to conceptualise accurately, both in theoretical maths and metaphysics, is hitting a limit defined, more than anything, by us and our capabilities as organisms. Our own human constraints of being; of perception and intelligence. To the humanist this would represent the death of progress. I am not a humanist.

In evolutionary biology things are even more deluded. Challenges like the non-progress of non-trivial genotype-phenotype prediction, or the ridiculous presumption that random or arbitrary genotype change will necessarily produce viable and/or useful change in the organism often enough to keep the evolutionary show on the road. I could go on and on- evolutionary biology is extreme presumption, not science. Just-so retrospection, not predictive theory. Again, there are pockets of proven validity, such as virus population change, but they are hardly case proof calibre for the entire discipline. Mathematical models of adequate rigour and sophistication just do not exist and very probably never will.

Yes, in some areas such as the permeation of microelectronics into the day-to-day, progress in science has been spectacular. Other established areas of engineering have also been pretty successful. But in the big picture theories, science is stalled and largely bankrupt, built on presumption and dodgy orthodoxy.

As a Christian, I am happy to acknowledge that in this age, we as humans just may not get too much further. The creator who framed our existence also constrained our intellects and perceptive capacity, for the time being at least. We will climb asymptotically to a ceiling of understanding which we will not penetrate. By all means continue trying, with a reasonable part of our resources, but be honestly realistic about the progress.

More on Christian Scientific Worldview

One of the hobby horses of atheists and creationists is of course the veracity of the Theory of Evolution. I personally cannot reconcile a worldview informed morally by the God of the Bible with the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Here I am not saying that evolution by natural selection never occurs. I am saying that I do not believe it pertains in the way it is normally applied as having developed the diversity of life. How we suppose there would have arrived a minimum viable organism for evolution to work with is of course another close to insurmountable hurdle.  I know there are fellow Christian believers who see things otherwise with evolution, as I mentioned in a previous post.

Science proceeds by evaluating evidence and postulating a governing mechanism for that evidence. As more data fits the mechanism, we may call our postulated mechanism a 'theory'. As the theory is applied repeatedly with successful prediction of results, we have a law. When does the theory become a law? Certainly when we can repeatedly get accurate day-to-day numerical predictions based on an equation-based numerical law such as Ohm's law. Evolution is far more complex and far harder to tie down to a numerical model, of course. So is cosmology; the big picture is beyond foreseeable numerical modelling, although some parts of the picture can be modelled. So science is about the plausibility of postulated mechanism. The postulated mechanism on its own is not necessarily good science of course. And here currently accepted 'science' varies widely.

Now science gets even more subjective when it comes to the relational and psychological arena. A former colleague of mine pointed out that 'ologies' are the more subjective end of science. Yet these areas bear strongly on how religious people such as myself think. It is one thing to talk about the plausibility of a postulated mechanism, here meaning evolution, from the scientific and statistical standpoint. It is another to discuss the character and relational nature of God and the implications they have for that theory. Why do I believe that God did not use evolution by natural selection to develop species into higher forms? Here I am talking about the intent of God, morally speaking, and not about the plausibility of the science. The 'science' has big problems, for sure. But surely the creator redeemer Christ of Paul's Letter to the Colossians would not use natural selection to do a neat experiment in bio-engineering. I do not believe God would have used natural selection in the beginning because it involves cruelty in the form of predation and suffering.

Of course, today, the selfish instinct for survival is readily seen in the animal kingdom, so how do we explain this? I will return to that question in a minute.

What is my own explanation for the physical evidence? I am inclined to believe that God used individual acts of special creation, i.e. of intelligent design. Built into these designs is the capacity to diversify through the reproductive process. However the degree of diversification possible within a created species is constrained, again by design. That diversification is of course a basis for selection to work on. However I do not believe Christians can reconcile predation and selective survival with the God of love, unless sin had already entered the world. This is why I believe that, at least for the present episode of creation, the one described in Genesis 1v2 onwards, that species were made by acts of special creation.

I will now return to the cruelty we see manifested today in the creation. The Bible teaches that the spiritual climate of planet Earth was violated in an event theologians and Bible scholars call the Fall. Here, Satan, a rebellious spiritual being, influenced man in the direction of strife. Man disobeyed God's specific prohibition. He succumbs to temptation. Man is no longer at peace and rest. Straining to better oneself enters into man's heart for the first time.  The animal kingdom is under Adams's jurisdiction. What happens to man therefore affects the biosphere in general. I think God allowed psychological and physical changes into the animal kingdom at this time which reflected the cataclysm in the human governance of Earth. Predation entered at the Fall, when sin entered into the physical world through Adam.

What about the age of the earth itself? I do not necessarily believe in the widely accepted inference that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Even the exactitude smacks of self-deception in the scientific community to me. However I accept that the world looks hundreds of millions or billions of years old by radiometric dating and other means. The accepted dating could be badly out, but not by enough to satisfy a young earth creationist. Some say God made the Earth look old to mislead our minds to prove our faith. I cannot accept that. I, and many others, got saved by a process which involved, amongst other things, looking logically at the evidence for the resurrection. Faith is not a call to throw logic away. It is a call to review and revise which facts your logic works on.

My present conclusions on origins? Taking all these factors discussed into account, I find it hard to reconcile the apparent approximate age of the Earth derived from radiometric dating with a once only, and recent, creation. God could have populated the earth in a very short time by acts of special creation, of course. I believe he probably did, as described in Genesis. But the fossil record does speak of much more ancient extinct species including predators. It seems to me likely that there were previous episodes of creation on earth, episodes that may also reflect falls from the perfect will of God due to rebellion and disobedience in the created orders of the times. These species were then wiped out in judgement. These episodes would then of course be recorded, to a degree, in the fossil record. Genesis 1v2 says that 'the Earth was (or became) void and without form'. As an illustration of this,when we look at the moon through magnifying optics, we see a desolate, and possibly desolated, place. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, called it 'magnificent desolation'. God could have caused the Earth to become 'without form and void' in a similar way.

So my doubts about evolution start from a belief in the God of the Bible, and his moral and emotional nature. While he steers the evil for his own purposes, he is not the wilful cause of evil or entities who have become evil, such as Satan. However in addition I have plenty of scientific reasons why I don't believe the theory of evolution by natural selection, at least not in its frequently accepted, all embracing, scope of application.

Forming Cohesive Beliefs on Origins

I have looked at some of the current opinions of the scientific community regarding origins of life on earth and have stated reasons for my doubts. I am a Christian. How do I personally integrate a worldview given two very different sources of insight; science and the Bible?

There are many who seek to drive a wedge between these two sources of opinion. They are generally scientists who are also militant atheists. Often starting in their reasoning with the arguments between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church concerning the position of the Earth in the solar system and indeed the cosmos, they see science as the stuff of logic and proof, and religion as the stuff of naive credulity.

This is not reality. In reality, science is a continuum of beliefs about the nature of reality from the readily demonstrable through to the tentatively held hypothesis. In other words, not all science is well agreed upon or widely considered reliable. So there may be realistic 'give' in the scientific outlook, areas where we have to admit that we do not know all the answers.

Scientific or naturalistic reductionism is the discipline which attempts to explain everything merely by logical processes which can be observed, characterized and understood. Such an approach ends up saying that everything is an accident that came from nothing. Our very conscious experience is an illusion.

I am not saying that the scientific method is wrong or bad, I am just saying that it must have limitations somewhere as we attempt to describe the big picture of reality. I have set some of these limitations out in previous posts.

If the Bible is indeed the Word of God, the creator, we need to look at how we might reconcile a Biblical view of origins with a scientific one. Since this is widely seen to have failed, I am looking for legitimate flexibility in both camps in order to reach a harmony.  

How much flexibility is there in the scientific opinions about origins? Just how reliable are the theories about origins? Here we are talking about Big Bang Cosmology, by which the heavens and earth, the latter seemingly pretty insignificant, were formed, and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, which seeks to explain the development of sophisticated life on Earth. How well-defined and how reliable are these theories?

On the other hand, what if the Bible is our starting point? (Why do that you ask? Many reasons, two I will give here. Because there is solid logical evidence for the resurrection of Christ, and because the Old Testament lines up well with other disciplines.) How much flexibility might we reasonably allow in our interpretation of Scripture in order to reconcile it with at least some of the conclusions of the scientific communities? For example, can we allow for the possibility that the initial creation account in Genesis Chapter 1 is allegorical and poetic, rather than a literal time line? Can we allow for the possibility that the six days of creation were 'day-ages'? (I use the phrase 'day-age' to mean a period of time described loosely as a day, but actually referring to an epoch. An example would be; 'the day of cheap fossil fuel is over').

Can we allow for the possibility that there were previous tranches of creation on Earth prior to the present one? This is commonly called 'the Gap Theory', because it implies that a great deal happened, in terms of creation and destruction, between Genesis Chapter 1v1 and v2. God created the heavens and the earth. Then a lot happened regarding which Genesis 1 is silent, and then the earth became void and without form.

If we take this 'gap' theory on board, we can interpret the fossil record differently to a young earth creationist  who argues for a literal reading of Genesis 1 and therefore an earth which is around 6000 years old. There is more flexibility when it comes to setting the dates of rocks and fossils.

When we read the Genesis account of creation, we are reading an account written in a non-scientific age. We should not be expecting a discourse including for example radiation energy and dark matter. We are looking for a representative description of how things came to be, for a framework from which to proceed. We should not be surprised if the author (ultimately God) uses techniques which simplify things, or even employ cultural assumptions from those times when the story was first told and written. The simplification is for the benefit of the reader, not because the author is ignorant or hiding.  

Against Intellectual Fascism in Science: Alister McGrath

This is a book review of sorts. God loves Richard Dawkins, and so should I, but I don't like his books much. Reading parts of 'The God Delusion' reminds me in an odd sort of way of reading parts of 'Mein Kampf' by Adolf Hitler. Hitler was fairly thoroughly convincing for many for a while. Same with Dawkins. They share certain characteristics. (Certainly not all, but bear with me!) There is the same sort of disdain for the dissenter and the same sort of simplistic and blinkered reasoning. Too much isolated reasoning. Too little caution regarding one's own possible underlying flaws, motives and presumptions. Unquestioning followers of both are likely to become fascists of some sort. On politics, I prefer to read Churchill because there is, as almost anyone would agree today, a better feel about it (though still hardly ideal). There is a more rounded, more corporate, more questioning approach to opinions and decision making. On complex matters, dogma is mostly replaced by realistically tenuous, reasonable opinions. Back to Dawkins. Is he a brave straight talker or a simplistic, insular, belligerent propagandist? I go for the latter. But I still love him because God does.

Now I am not against firm opinions. I believe John 3:16, 10:10 and 14:6 absolutely and dogmatically. I am just dogmatic about different things. I believe I have good reason for that.  

Sorry about the diversion. Back to faith and science. Better perhaps to read some more open-minded books which attempt to reconcile theology/religion with science, books discussing the reasonable boundaries of each discipline.*

I have enjoyed Alister McGrath 'Why God Won't Go Away' enormously, and also Andrew Parker 'The Genesis Enigma'.

Andrew Parker adopts a similar worldview to Francis Collins, a leading US geneticist foundational in mapping the human genome. Collins wrote a book called 'The Language of God'. The title refers to the quaternary genetic code realized in the DNA molecule. In the book he attempts to consolidate the theory of evolution using biochemical and genetic evidence. He also opines concerning the room for faith in God in parallel with his acceptance of the mainstream scientific evolutionary perspective. Parker, alternatively, is a researcher in Natural History. He makes much of the fact that there is a similar, even identical order in which things appear in Creation as related in Genesis, and according to mainstream scientific opinion. Mainstream scientific opinion of course sees Big Bang Cosmology and Evolution as being the big picture behind how we all got to be here**.

I do not agree with Collins and Parker concerning the effectiveness and scope of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Parker adopts many of the assumptions of the mainstream view without challenging them. Assumptions like chance abiogenesis, the self assembly of the first living cell purely by chance. Or the inevitability of genetic mutation producing useful change. Parker takes these on board without questioning. These assumptions are, to me, frankly ridiculous. To be more positive, Collins and Parker are of course, gifted, widely-read thinkers, and in the case of Collins, a high achiever in research science. Yet their opinions in these 'big picture' arenas are held in a manner somewhat more realistically tenuous and flexible than those of the New Atheists. The slightly scary intellectual fascism is not there.If  Dawkins had been writing to deliberately annoy me, he would have succeeded. Parker and Collins I found easier to bear. But then they are both theists.

Concerning science, one would have thought that the New Atheists might have avoided the move to simplistic, and ultimately wholly illogical and dogmatic, attempts to suppress reasonable dissent.

Which brings me back to McGrath. I have not even read all of it yet, but he does a superb job of raising very legitimate and logical objections to some of the New Atheist lines of reasoning. He does so by spelling out inconsistencies and assumptions in their methods which are very hard to ignore once highlighted. In  particular, the naivety of the assumption that the scientific method will necessarily be able to probe all reality and truth is dismantled convincingly.

Bottom Line: Other means of assimilating truth are required. Other than what? Other than accepting the mainstream opinions of the scientific community. Other than endlessly attempting to apply the scientific method until we are conjecturing so much that the reliability of our conclusions is very questionable. I would go for investigating the Bible as a reality reference point. It is based on a Revelation given in Condescension, not on human deductive logic taken to unreliable extremes.

* On the other hand, maybe read Dawkins anyway if you are a doubter. McGrath tells at the end of his book of how a reader of Dawkins was so struck by the one-sidedness of his arguments that he started attending church to check it out and got soundly converted! Indeed McGrath himself is a former atheist.

** I would advise people to discriminate in their thinking between 'mainstream opinions of the scientific community' and 'reliable science'. Where the boundary between these arises is a subjective matter. I was a development engineer for several years and engineers hopefully use 'reliable science' only. If they don't, planes crash etc etc.

Big Bang Cosmology- How Far Back?

The current scientific consensus is that the universe came into being following an event known as the ‘Big Bang’. Matter expanded rapidly from an extremely hot, extremely dense state, having transmuted from pure energy. Matter and energy then sprang forth to form the universe as we know it. This conclusion is drawn by interpreting certain observed information, notably two phenomena, the cosmic microwave background and the red shift of distant objects. 

The Big Bang is a generic expression for theories of this general nature but which may differ in the understanding of details. The prevailing detailed theory is the Lambda CDM model.

On the face of it there is reasonable evidence for some sort of Big Bang scenario. However as we probe into very early cosmological time, and try to evaluate what happened when matter first came into existence, we find there is little theory or consensus. There is an initial time, called the Planck Epoch, before which it is impossible, according to current understanding of fundamental physics, to probe. There are no firm ideas on what ‘seeded’ the Big Bang.  There is no understanding of what came before the Big Bang, or indeed whether there was a 'before'.

We are caught in the flow of time. Richard Feynman sets this out for those who have never considered it in his excellent book 'The Character of Physical Law'. When considering long gone events, we are left with our imagination and our ability to extrapolate backwards to form a view of the past. When we do this we rely on the assumption that there are no sudden changes or unexpected factors, other than the ones we already know about or have inferred. We often make many large jumps of conjecture. We assume we have all the information, all the relevant laws, all the correct theories, all the variables, all the significant factors. These are big assumptions.

It is certainly possible that God could have used a process similar to the Big Bang to create the Universe. The theory does have some widely acknowledged problems, such as the matter/anti-matter balance, and the dark matter/dark energy hypothesis/mystery. 

What the Big Bang Theory certainly does not do is rigorously explain how everything came from nothing. The prevailing lambda CDM model for cosmological origins requires the sudden appearance of expanding space-time. It does not tell us where space-time came from. It also requires immense radiation energy, again without rigorously explaining where it came from. It requires the background conceptual fabric of mathematics. Does that have an existence independent of any physical reality. If so, why?

If scientists are going to see scientific reductionism as a complete explanation of beginnings, to rid themselves of that word 'creation', then we will have to get beyond this point. I do not believe there are currently any meaningful leads on this one.