A weird argument from Francis Collins’ BioLogos
May 12, 2009 by Chris Hallquist |
So, Francis Collins, using Templeton Foundation dollars, has set up a group called BioLogos to promote the harmony of science and religion. And, as Jerry Coyne points out, they’ve got some weird stuff on quantum mechanics:
Even before Darwin’s contribution to biology, the scientific revolution in physics marked a tremendous advance in our understanding of the world. Scientists discovered that the world’s behavior could be explained and predicted with great accuracy on the basis of physical laws. Nature, as understood at the time, appeared to reliably follow a set of fundamental rules. For example, the motion of planets could be explained as a necessary result of their obedience to the force of gravity. This understanding of the world lent itself to the belief in a rational, consistent creator.But, as Polkinghorne puts it, these laws might also come across as “a gift from the Greeks.”5 Given a second look, they challenge basic theism. For as much as these laws signify a rational creator, their trustworthiness could also imply God’s absence. After all, if the laws of nature can explain almost any phenomenon, how is God involved? In order to understand how God could take an active role, or how the world could have any inherent freedom, the laws of nature must be somehow open or flexible. The world’s future cannot be entirely determined or predictable from any given moment.
The mechanical worldview of the scientific revolution is now a relic. Modern physics has replaced it with a very different picture of the world. With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems, the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development. Of course, the question remains whether this openness is a result of nature’s true intrinsic chanciness or the inevitable limit to humans’ understanding. Either way, one thing is clear: a complete and detailed explanation or prediction for nature’s behavior cannot be provided. This was already a problem for Newtonian mechanics; however, it was assumed that in principle, science might eventually provide a complete explanation of any natural event. Now, though, we see that the laws of nature are such that scientific prediction and explanation are ultimately limited.
It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognizable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law breaking miracles. Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God’s action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction.
In some ways, this over-simplifies things in a way that is unfair to theism: the standard religious view when the Newtonian world view reigned would have been that nature follows uniform laws, but God sometimes intervenes in them. And the most sensible criticism of this view is not that we absolutely know that there are such violations, but that the evidence for them is crummy, and the most reasonable conclusion is that the supposed violations aren’t happening. So yeah, the scientific view of the world is a problem for religion, though the reasons are a little more subtle than the article suggests.
The stuff about quantum mechanics, though, is just ridiculous. Truth is, scientists, even outside of physics, deal with unpredictable phenomena all the time, and we have a quite good idea about how to think about them. A good hypothesis–and quantum mechanics is included here–will make a prediction about what should happen over many experimental trials. Scientists then take that prediction, run the experiments, and use statistical analysis to decide if the difference between predicted and actual results is significant. It may not be an “absolute” prediction, in the words of the article, but you don’t really get that even when studying deterministic phenomena, because there’s always questions like “is there a slight error in the measurements?” and “were the initial conditions really what I thought?”
Divine monkeying with quantum probabilities, then, is detectable in principle, in the same way that any other probabilistic effect is detectable. Sure, it’s possible that God is keeping his probabilistic monkeying subtle, but he could be keeping outright violations of natural laws subtle too. In both cases, we should say that, without any good evidence, no monkeying around is occurring.
P.S.: Reading over this post, I’ve realized that the author of the original piece also seems to think you can mess with the results of a chaotic system without violating the laws of the system. But this is false: the whole point of chaotic systems is that small changes in the initial conditions have big effects on the ends results, but these effects occur in a perfectly lawful way. That’s what makes chaos so interesting, but the author treats it as another random piece of mumbo-jumbo.
