Paul Davies: We are meant to be here

Paul Davies: We are meant to be here:

[If] you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life? Many scientists hate this idea -- what's often called "the anthropic principle." They suspect it's a trick to argue for a designer God. But more and more physicists point to various laws of nature that have to be calibrated just right for stars and planets to form and for life to appear...

British-born cosmologist Paul Davies calls this cosmic fine-tuning the "Goldilocks Enigma." Like the porridge for the three bears, he says the universe is "just right" for life. Davies is an eminent physicist who's received numerous awards, including the Templeton Prize and the Faraday Prize from the Royal Society in London. His 1992 book "The Mind of God" has become a classic of popular science writing. But his new book, "The Cosmic Jackpot," will challenge even the most open-minded readers. Without ever invoking God, Davies argues for a grand cosmic plan. The universe, he believes, is filled with meaning and purpose.

(via)

Update:

Right. I'm not talking about time travel. This is just standard quantum physics. Standard quantum physics says that if you make an observation of something today -- it might just be the position of an atom -- then there's an uncertainty about what that atom is going to do in the future. And there's an uncertainty about what it's going to do in the past. That uncertainty means there's a type of linkage. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance."

Um, Einstien was referring to quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance", not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Philosophy, Science | id 8266

13:58 (utc-5)
edited: 14:12 (utc-5)

 

Dawkins on morality and responsibility

Richard Dawkins on morality and responsibility:

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it...

Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? ... Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. ... But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Permalink | 5 Comments | Tags: Evolution | id 7838

13:24 (utc-5)

 

The "intelligent design" ruling

I just wrote a post on the recent "intelligent design" court ruling, in a comment.

Update: Ned Batchelder has a reasonable post on the issue:

I think the three or four paragraphs of disclaimer the ID folks wanted read was not such a big deal, and would have been a great jumping off point for a discussion about what science is and is not. An entire class (or more) could be given over to the topic. It wouldn't be teaching intelligent design, it would be teaching the philosophy of science with the current ID debate as a backdrop.

Note: comments are closed on this post so that I can keep any discussion centralized on post I linked to up top.

Permalink | Tags: Opinions/Politics, Religion, Science | id 7778

06:51 (utc-5)
edited: 17:43 (utc-5)

 

Clayton Cramer on ID

Clayton Cramer on ID:

Look, being persecuted and retaliated against isn't proof that Intelligent Design is correct, but the evolutionary establishment's foaming at the mouth suggests that ID has hit a nerve that "Creation science" never did. That's because Intelligent Design has a few proponents who are legitimate scientists, working in the fields of biochemistry and microbiology--and some of its criticisms are very powerful.

"... some of its criticisms are very powerful". That's all I've been saying. You fundamentally can't answer the question of origins scientifically. It's an historical question. However, the range of scientific disciplines can be queried for what they have to say about the subject. Evolution's proponents look for what they'd consider evidence of some species having their origin in the mutations of other species, while ID's proponents look for what they'd consider evidence for an intelligence having to be behind what we see in biology and other areas of science.

It's obviously going to be a judgement call of what you'd accept as evidence one way or the other, and that judgement will be determined by your prior philosophical commitments. If you have a prior commitment to a naturalistic explanation of our origins, you'll buy into evolution. If you don't, you might be willing to accept a supernatural explanation of our origins. But the important point to understand is that the ID scientists and the evolutionary scientists are on the exact same plane as far as evidence is concerned.

For instance, if the fossil record clearly showed very gradual changes in species over time from the simplest organisms to, say, humans, that'd be pretty compelling evidence that there was such an evolution. But, that's not what we find in the fossil record. On the other hand, if Behe is correct that certain structures we find in biology truly are irreducibly complex, that's pretty compelling evidence that they had to have been designed.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Evolution | id 7575

14:33 (utc-5)
edited: 14:57 (utc-5)

 

TCS: Is Intelligent Design a Bad Scientific Theory or a Non-Scientific Theory?

TCS: Is Intelligent Design a Bad Scientific Theory or a Non-Scientific Theory? (via Glenn Reynolds). Very good article, only I wish he'd applied the same standard to evolution, including natural selection or evolution more generally.

Now, obviously ID is bogus as a scientific theory. However, the types of things its propenents are saying are not useless. For example, if a living system can somehow be proven irredicibly complex, that's important, as are appeals to information or probability theory to show that evolution from the simplest life to more complex life (obviously ignoring the issue of how life arose in the first place) is so astronomically implausible that the idea should be basically rejected out of hand. I think those types of things are at least worth mentioning when discussing evolution in the classroom. (Though in my experience, evolution isn't taught so much as merely assumed in the classroom.)

Teaching ID as a scientific theory of its own is obviously bogus, but mentioning dissent to prevailing "scientific" theory should be part of any scientific curriculum, in any field.

Permalink | 14 Comments | Tags: Science | id 7562

07:27 (utc-5)
edited: 08:08 (utc-5)