[Cameron]

Originally published in The Weekly Standard, February 18, 2002

[_Jim]

For some, even on this board, it's just "Man and Physics".

[Southack]

God's existence may not be "required" for quantum mechanics, but for complex mathematical device programming, that's another matter altogether.

All life on Earth is formed via DNA. DNA is comprised of various parings of four root elements: A, C, G, and T components. In math, that's represented as A=0, C=1, G=2, and T=3. 0, 1, 2, 3. That's a mathematical Base 4 system.

These Base-4 groups form the genetic programming of every life form on Earth, wrapped in a physical Double-Helix structure/format. The Base-4 groups are most frequently seen in sub-groups (or sub-programs or sub-routines) known as genes.

These genes are often seen being reused, usually verbatim, in multiple species.

We see such similar programming code re-use in Man-made languages/programs, except that at its most basic point, Man's programming is Base-2 (AKA "binary"), an order of magnitude lower than the Base-4 coding seen in DNA.

The concept that programming an order of magnitude greater than Man's best software - could appear randomly (i.e., without the aid of an Intelligent Designer), is even more ludicrous than the notion that MicroSoft Windows, Linux, and AutoCad would spontaneously form from pure white noise if you left your computer on for several million years.

Quantum mechanics may or may not need a God to exist, but DNA coding was certainly done by someone smarter than we are today.

[Joe Brower]

Very cool and enjoyable essay. It has always interested me that science, for all it's amazing feats, can not and does not even begin to explain the most fundamental questions underlying our existence. Questions like:

"Why are we here?"

"Where are we going?"

"How long have we got?"

Weinberg stated when he recieved his 1978 Nobel prize in physics that "The more we discover about the universe, the more it becomes pointless and meaningless". Sounds like he's trying hard to convince himself.

Regarding the "Goldilocks Universe", Steven Hawking joked about "the anthropomorphic principle of physics", to wit: "Why is the universe exactly the way it is? Because if it was not, we wouldn't be here to ask the question".

The mathematics of western science is powerful and vast, but, as Heins Pagels noted in "The Cosmic Code", all math gives us is descriptions of phenomena, not the phenomena itself. For example, the planets revolve around the sun according to paths described by Newton's differential equations. But the planets are no more solving math equations than they are hanging from strings held by some celestial hand. They are simply moving.

One irony to all of this is that, when and if mankind does finally find God, it will be science, not religion, that will find him.

Just my view from the saddle...

[ableChair]

As a gravitational physicist, I've heard rants like this quite a bit and they generally represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what is currently 'known'. Many well known physicists have overlooked the finer details and depth of what we have already established, not because they are dim-witted, but because the concepts involved stretch the capacities of human cognition to it's breaking point. It is only after many years that we even begin to fully understand the Great Theories postulated and largely proven decades before.

One example of this relates directly to the notion of a God, and what science can say about it. Few people realize that the scientific method itself has already recursively demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it is insufficient for a complete understanding of Nature. But this is only unambiguously understood when one understands the full implications of Quantum Field Theory, especially what is known as Objective State Vector Reduction (R. Penrose) and the fact that some quantum coherent states evolve into classical systems in a matter that is non-algorithmic and inherently unpredicatable. Let's be clear: this means that there are Natural processes, clearly identified by the scientific method (they DO occur naturally), that can yield outcomes that cannot, in principle, be predicted in advance. This defeats the notion of scientific objectivism and predictability entirely. It matters not what technology you possess, what great minds you apply, or how lucky you get, the very Laws of Nature forbid such predictability.

This is the very essence of what we regard as 'mind', and 'consciousness'; that is, it possesses the quality of being non-deterministic, at least partly. Where does the 'decision' for a truly 'random' (as humans measure it) come from. It isn't human, as it occurs in Nature. Are these shadows of the mind of God? There has never been a more powerful, damning and thorough argument for the existence of a God than this, yet only in the last couple of years have some of the brightest physicists begun to catch on to this revelation and fully appreciate it's implications. It was only because I've been working directly on the unification issue that I became aware of this profound fact about non-deterministic behavior, and studied it carefully. Most mathematical physicists don't bother with unification: it's too damn hard. But some of us fools keep pressing. But for me, at least, it's about the journey, not necessarily reaching the destination.

In fact, it is amazing how few physicists, or people for that matter, even understand what it means to state a principled truth vs. a practiced truth, yet confusion continues, even in the highest levels of academia. Something weird is going on in the universe and we don't fully understand what it is yet. QFT suggests we probably never will. Any complete theory of Nature will be, in some sense, incomplete, inasmuch as it will necessarily restrict it's scope to those Natural phenomenon that are principally predictable. It's not a huge loss, it could explain the VAST majority of all Natural processes humans are capable of observing, but it leaves just one titillating scintilla of weirdness for which the puny minds of man can only ponder.

[Physicist]

My example of fine tuning: to at least ten significant digits, every person's legs are exactly as long as they need to be to reach the ground. That's too close a match to have been a random coincidence, therefore our legs must have been intelligently designed.

[Aurelius]

BUMP

[onedoug]

I'll try not to sin so much.

[js1138]

In 1953 Edwin Salpeter discovered that the resonance between helium and intermediate beryllium atoms, like the relation between an opera singer and the glass she shatters, is precisely tuned to facilitate beryllium production.

And this proves that if things were different then they wouldn't be the same. For example, if earth hadn't been shattered by asteroids at just the right intervals, wiping out just the right species and allowing just the right successors to flourish -- well then we might have two head and brains the size of peas, or something.

All this confirms the inerrancy of the King James translation, or something.

All flames and kidding aside, the absence of a complete description of reality by science neither promotes nor detracts from belief. But the argument from fine tuning says nothing. It merely affirms that one's legs are long enough to reach the ground.

[ArGee]

If you're limited to the rather trivial tools that physics provides you will most certainly not find G-d.

Fortunately, we are not so limited unless we limit ourselves.

Shalom.

[r9etb]

bump for later

[freedom9]

bump to read later

[WIMom]

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[lavaroise]

The issue is that in mathematics/physics, for a system to be controllable, it has to be observable. The Bible brings a new "mathematical" realm when it claims that for moral behavior to be controled, it cannot be observable. Hence, knowing good from evil leads man and woman to become totaly confused and further depraved.

The reason is that jurisdiction, more than inherent behavior, becomes a problem when claims of knowledge of good and evil occurs. Often, for example, the jury of peers system in a courtroom is often mistaken to be an agent by which right and wrong is judged, but it is not the case since the jury of peers does not advise nor determine a punishment sentence, it only looks at evidence and come to an agreement about what might have happened. There is no vigilante jurisdiction of the jury against the defendant, and juries are told to be impartial and presume the person innocent for this very reason. If good vs. evil were the jury's concern, then the jury would never be impartial since jury members might have a completely different idea, irrelevant of the case, as to what is right or wrong.

Again, it seems that the more one knows about good and evil, the more one is prone to this political vigilantism that destroys justice and the function of society through jurisdiction violations. Much like quantum mechanics, the more observable is the object in position (a society's state of evilness), the less we know about its speed (a society's direction in controling this evilness).

Mathematicians, many of those I have met, share interest in political systems like communism, invariably making the atheist's error that for society to be ideal, it needs to be controllable, i.e. it needs to be fully observable and it needs to be controlled with improving systems. However the communist is always partial from the get go in such a system, he his adherent to a system of politicaly correct form of vigilante rule, and it is often confusing actions against evil from evil actions that violate people through vigilante lynchings. Hence the communist will often act for his own benefit than for removing what it perceives is evil. After all, what else means a system to improve society through social "justice" but a system by which a person sees a personal benefit through control (a society or socialism that fits their needs), as opposed to really improving society. Social justice is not about justice, it rather is social vigilantism and government/bureaucratic encroachments on a person's jurisdiction.

Note that courtrooms have a jurisdiction of their own, however, as through the judge. But the bringing of a court case is supposed to be initialy a case that aims to shed light on the truth and events so that society may learn from situations. Court cases, originaly, are ex-jurisdiction. Only prosecutors appropriate jurisdiction in accusing the defendant of having themselves gone beyond the bounds of their allowable jurisdiction in society, the crime of all crimes.

It will hence always amaze me when doctors or so called experts claim they benefit society in the case of abortion, when they insist it is a private case that is no one's business to judge but themselves with the patient. That, people, is a refusal to look at an activity in scientific manner through a jury of peers, an activity that violates the jurisdiction and life of the child, a choice of condemnation they make based on their own personal beliefs and ideas, away from the public need to know of this operation done on society. Prosecutors have been having a very hard time winning cases against this jurisdiction infringment because the main witness is never able to speak for itself and because of other difficulties.

The difficulty, again, in attaining justice, is that people have a difficulty understanding justice because we all learn to think with a Matrix of definitions and memories. We control our environement by translating its perception into a language that our brain then translates into lower level impulses (as per the brain lambda computation theory) for mental processing. Seeing a red ball, the child can decompose the content of the object in color components, motion attributes, textures, volumetric shape and dynamic characteristics such as rolling. In order to control the ball the child gives a name to each of these components. Once the ball behaves in expected manner, the child can form sentences with the stored characteristics of the ball. Hence "the ball is rolling" is a form of computer language describing what the child perceives. This language is then processed to lambda calculations that enable the child to react neurologicaly to the situation.

Note that we learn to live by being able to observe and control. Yet the Bible forbids us that expressedly in matters of morals and other taboos for the expressed reason that things like love or morals are not identifyable via computations. Hence the Bible forbids us, IMO, from claiming to digging information from our matrix of knowledge in oder to make a decision on those matters. After all, we may define things which ever way we want in relativistic manner. That makes any of our claims to explain behavior completely ludicrous.

Moreover, the Bible's taboos are jurisdictional taboos, not behavioral taboos per say. Hence, for example, one shall not commit adultery because that causes out of wedlock pregnancies, a situation that violates the child's right. The sexual act in itself is not blamed, it is the violation of jurisdiction.

So one may ask then how can we judge even a violation of jurisdiction if it cannot be judged. Well, we are not talking about judging here, we are talking about a fact finding mission from a jury of peers. We also are talking about a prosecution justifying itself behind the counterprosecuting argument: the defendant prosecuted, so we will prosecute back, both opposite parties are obviously checking each other and making partial judgmental claims of their own, and now a jury of peers will come in between and look at what is happening in impartiality.

Hence, since life is not perfect and that crimes and prosecutions are inevitable, these crimes and prosecutions need to balance and check each other so that the community can be served by this conflict in intelligent manner. A communist system would essentialy do away with that and implement daily controls on people's lives to work toward a goal in militarist prosecution. In fact any system with a goal out there is prosecuting, save for those systems that understand that the "goal" is not prosecuting a goal, but checks and balances to serve society, a sort of goaless goal.

Another angle on Biblical novelty is the term love. Love is essentialy a claimless claim, much like above's goaless goal. Love is more tactical than the strategic checks and balances. Solomon, after all, did not cut that baby in half, not because he knew in his Matrix of perceptions that the baby belonged in fact to that harlot as opposed to the other, but because that one lady showed love. She did not make a claim on the child, nor did she characterise or define anything in particular, characteristics derived from one's intelligence and knowledge matrix, no, she just accomplished by inserting herself between the blade and the child, as opposed to actuated her surroundings through persuasive talk or blames.

She did not even counter prosecute Solomon nor criticised him, but acknowledged that no one's personal definition of the situation was justified, including her own definition of the child as hers, as well as the other woman's claim. In fact she would rather die as a sinner herself and let the child live with the other woman. She makes a claimless claim. She claims for the child's own life out of love; she does not give up the child willingly to the other harlot out of love; yet she would rather die and have the child taken away from her by force out of love; she does not claim the life of the child either, seeing to it that the child is not the object of the dispute but lack of love. She claims without claiming. She claims without claiming a particular object that can be palpable or memorable in one's matrix of definitions.

We see hence, as in many other compromises in the Bible that can be interpreted one way or the other, that there is a definite vital message there that cannot be compromised in the end, and the main ones listed above can be concluded as follows. Judgment of people, as opposed to judgment of things or animals, transcends sought out knowledge, and those who seek judgment of people and institutions of people are to be judged themselves with a counterprosecution. Love too transcends sought out knowledge, and those who love should be rewarded with the stewardship they prove, for they do not give up this stewardship, yet would rather die and lose stewardship in front line battles while protecting the object of stewardship, than seeing the oject of stewardship being ravaged by the enemy, let alone by their own cowardice.

[maxwell]

What gets me (as someone in the field) is how many physicists assume that their degree automatically renders their religious (or non) viewpoints superior to those of the "lay public"...

[steve-b]

There Is Insufficient Data For A Meaningful Answer

[Age of Reason]

Someone once said that miracles only happen to those who believe in them.