God versus Particle Physics: A No-Score Draw

Title page

God versus Particle Physics

A No-Score Draw

A Psychological Analysis of Theories about Life, the Universe, and Everything…

J.B. Davies

Copyright page

Copyright © John B. Davies, 2013

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by

Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally distributed in the USA by

Ingram Book Company,

One Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086, USA

2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Chapter 1: Prologue

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible. — Stuart Chase, 1888

The above quote is normally viewed as applying primarily to religious belief systems. However, it cuts both ways. Certain kinds of science regularly feature in the popular media. In particular, contemporary theories of physics about how the world works, how the universe hangs together, and what ‘stuff’ is made of are often to the forefront in this process. As a result, most of us are familiar with such things as black holes, super-colliders, dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang as a consequence of the ways in which these things are represented to us. This book is primarily about those representations and the ways in which they differ from, and also resemble, the alternative Creation myths of religious doctrine.

Most of us glean our understandings of the physical sciences from what we see on television, read in the papers, or read about in popular science books. These accounts are generally produced by scientists who seek to encourage a greater understanding of science amongst the lay public, and in some cases it is their explicit job to do so. My own understanding of physical science comes largely from these sources, so this book is also a comment on how good a job the scientists have done. For example, my assumption until recently has always been that these types of accounts describe some state of agreed scientific knowledge about how ‘life, the universe, and everything’[1] really works. It is a surprise, then, to find that the accounts turn out to be increasingly speculative, inconsistent, and sometimes mutually contradictory. So this book is also about the inconsistencies and contradictions in scientists’ attempts to explain to the rest of us what they do, and how the universe works.

Scientists regularly undertake the task of communicating their science to the general public. Professor Richard Dawkins, for example, until 2008 was Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and did a wonderful job of explaining the theory of evolution to a broad audience, and at the same time contrasting that theory with the tenets of religious belief from a broadly rationalist perspective.

However, religion and science are perhaps not the polar opposites we assume them to be. Religious belief has an explicitly moral basis, but the moral basis for science, while not absent, takes a bit more looking for given its supposed no-nonsense and objective basis. Bearing in mind that the word ‘moral’ varies cross-culturally, with moral codes ranging from those that seem sublimely self-effacing through to those that are openly barbaric, religious dogmas seem generally to attempt to answer the questions Why did it all happen, and why are we here? In contrast, scientific thinking seems to focus more on a different pair of questions, namely How did it all happen, and how do we come to be here? In other words, there’s a ‘why’ question and there’s a ‘how’ question.

As a boy, I read books that my father bought as part of his desire to educate himself; he had a whole selection of books from the Everyman series. These were cheap little books in reddish-buff covers, with a picture of Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker on the spines, which had the laudable aim of bringing enlightenment, rationality, and basic scientific understanding to working men and women at a price they could afford. There were books on a variety of topics, including one on basic physics, and how it stood in opposition to the concepts of heaven and hell. I believe Robert Ingersoll may have been the author. The arguments were maybe a bit simplistic by modern philosophical standards, but included the argument that if heaven was up in the sky somewhere, it was strange that it was nowhere to be found; that the existence of an invisible superbeing who could attend to and act on every word that was said to him was highly unlikely, and in any case, where was he;[2] that natural events had natural rather than supernatural antecedents; and ending with the Enlightenment idea of a forthcoming golden age when all frontiers of knowledge would fall before the glorious alliance of free-thinking and science, leaving metaphysical explanation unnecessary.

Probably because of these early experiences, I dismiss any literal God solution to the why question out of hand. Perhaps there is no why question to answer with respect to life and the universe, and if that is the case then only scientific theories have any value with regard to explaining ‘reality’. I do find this a bit disappointing, however. It is after all a bit of a let-down if the only purpose behind the universe is its own existence, and the only point of human life is to hang around for a while and then die, but there it is. It is not without a measure of disappointment, then, that I focus on the how question, and look to science in its various forms to at least provide a decent answer to that question.

But these days I have a problem. The basis on which I dismiss God, Heaven, Hell, and the miracles of the Bible is that they make no sense in terms of what I can see and observe. They are not rational, flying as they do in the face of the ‘laws of nature’. Water into wine? Not possible. Feeding a massive throng with a loaf and some small fish? Not possible. I cannot, in these instances, envision any way in which such events could happen. The senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are my only routes to accessing the reality of the world (whatever it is) and thus are my only routes to rational, verifiable, and applicable knowledge about that world. From that basis, it seems unreasonable to accept the idea that, once we get to Jesus, the saints, and other miracle workers, all is explained by the simple assertion that the laws of physics simply don’t apply at that point; that they ‘break down’ where these people and events are concerned. That is just too easy and convenient to say, and amounts to asking me to abandon my rationalist belief system at that point.

But then a bigger problem arises. Modern physics offers explanations of how the universe was born out of the Big Bang, describes the properties of black holes, notes how subatomic particles can apparently be in two places at the same time, explains how dark matter binds the whole thing together, and many other wonders. But these things do not speak for themselves;[3] they have to be described in words or symbols, and it is people who decide what words and symbols shall be used and what shall be described or not described. Put rather more simply, it is extremely easy for both priests and physicists to use words to describe the impossible. The danger then arises that the impossible thing described in words only starts to take on the form of reality, and people start to think it actually exists because, after all, they’ve just described it. And that is a psychological, not a physics, problem.

It is primarily because of this glitch in logical thinking that the conclusions arrived at by some contemporary physicists are so strange[4] that they too can only be defended by explicitly stating that the laws of physics break down,[5] just as they apparently do in the Bible.

But that is not an explanation. Stating that at some point a long-favoured explanation is no longer valid is clearly a failure of an explanation. If you took your car to the garage and asked the automobile-physicist, or mechanic as we call them, to explain why it wouldn’t go, and he/she said The problem with your car is that none of the available theories of why cars don’t go apply in this case, you would be less than impressed. And if such a pseudo-explanation won’t do for Jesus and car mechanics, then from any reasonable perspective it won’t do for scientists either. Being a physicist does not endow a person with an inherent right to be believed where others, on similar grounds, are disbelieved. It is not clear that physicists, and physicists alone, have the right to decide where the laws of physics shall, and shall not, apply.

It has sometimes been suggested that the how question and the why question can be brought together under a single roof, by the simple expedient of suggesting that the Big Bang is merely a description of ‘how God did it’. But this is even more unsatisfactory than either of these things taken individually. Using one set of metaphysical concepts to rescue a second set of metaphysical concepts does not solve a problem but merely makes the conclusion twice as metaphysical.

At risk of offending both camps simultaneously, maybe we are entitled to be gently satirical about this state of affairs. Feeding an 18,000-strong Kilmarnock football crowd on a Saturday afternoon with two of Browning’s excellent individual pies and a small bag of chips is little more than a conjuring trick compared to producing an entire universe out of nowhere. If the Lord God surpasseth our understanding, he is no longer on his own. The physicists appear to have joined the club. This probably explains why I find myself unconsciously humming the Johnny Green/Edward Heyman hit song from the 1930s, Out of Nowhere, whenever anyone starts telling me about the Big Bang.

1 Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is the source of a number of quotes throughout this text.

2 God was always a man in those days.

3 The idea of the scientist as the unmotivated mouthpiece for data that ‘speak for themselves’ cannot be sustained, and will be discussed later.

4 Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, memorably stated something like, "Anyone who thinks they understand quantum mechanics doesn’t understand the first word about it. There are various versions of this quote, all with much the same meaning. He also said, perhaps even more importantly, Never express yourself more clearly than you can think." Ignorance of this mantra may explain why so often the totally incomprehensible is expressed as if it were a self-evident matter of fact.

5 The usual form of words is to state that ‘the standard model’ no longer applies, which means exactly the same thing but sounds a bit better.

Chapter 2: The No-Score Draw

For a long time I ran an applied psychology unit, and had the opportunity to work in the real world in a number of exciting contexts that not all academics have the opportunity, or perhaps sometimes the desire, to experience. This involved work in the area of public health, which took me into the homes and environments of drug users in a number of different countries, and also into operating theatres where people were having knees and hips replaced. But applied psychology is a broad field, and the portfolio also included work in tracking down the causes of human error in civil nuclear plants, on trains, and on nuclear submarines. My team and I spent much of the time looking for ‘EPCs’, or error-promoting-conditions. EPCs are things that arise from the way work is organised, and from the design of the jobs that people do. They increase the probability that a person will make a particular kind of error at a particular point in a process not because they are lazy or inattentive or careless, but because of the nature of the task and how it has been set up. In all these cases the work took me outside the university and allowed me to work in, and experience, a number of most exciting, challenging, and potentially dangerous environments.

Quite often, the cause of an EPC involved not only the demand characteristics and design of the environments in which people worked and the machines they had to operate, but also involved the ‘mental model’ they had of the task beforehand, and the way they conceptualised the problem to be solved. Thinking about things in certain fixed ways, and preconceptions about the nature of the task to be accomplished, were often key features in the poor decisions they made and the erroneous conclusions they arrived at. In other words, the errors were frequently down to the ways they thought about stuff rather than simply what they did with it.

At the same time, the work also started to fascinate the whole team from a different point of view. Our reading habits changed radically over a period of some ten years. Firstly, instead of just mainstream psychology, we started to read about machines, nuclear plants, trains, submarines, and the physical principles underlying their operation. Secondly, in order to understand the explanations people gave when describing what they did, what they thought, and why things went wrong, we started to read about language from a philosophical point of view. It became critical to our work to try to understand why people explained things the way they did, rather than simply taking what they said as ‘fact’. Prominent here was the approach taken by Wittgenstein,[1] which seemed to have a lot in common with the psychological literature on functional attribution, especially when it comes to understanding people’s explanations for why something went rather well, or conversely went pear-shaped. So, taken together, we focused on theories of how the world worked, and theories of how people explained its workings; which are not the same thing.

Very briefly, attribution theory is a psychological theory that studies the ways in which people construct explanations for the things they do and the things that happen to them. In its classic form, it makes no assumptions about the truth or falsity of the explanations offered, but merely records the reliability with which certain types of situations are explained in certain predictable ways. The closely related idea of ‘functional attribution’ looks at the social purposes served by certain types of explanations, again without making any assumptions about truth or falsity.[2]

In very simplified terms, most of us tend to explain any actions we perform that lead to positive outcomes by providing explanations that invoke personal credit; that is we make an ‘internal’ attribution (e.g. "I thought it was about time someone did something about this awful state of affairs, so I decided to fix it; the functional implication being: What a good person I am"). Conversely, we tend to attribute things with bad outcomes to other people or circumstances (I never meant this to happen, but I had no alternative in the circumstances; functional implication: I’m a good person really but the world ganged up on me). A short period observing the utterances of politicians when they respectively recommend either a) an increase in pensions or b) an increase in taxes will serve to illustrate the basic principle.

With these thoughts in mind, I discovered a number of books about different types of physics; books aimed specifically at explaining some pretty difficult concepts in simple words, for the benefit of non-physicists. These included James Gleick’s Chaos; John Barrow’s Impossibility; Michio Kaku and Jennifer Thompson’s Beyond Einstein; John Gribbin’s Deep Simplicity and In search of Schrödinger’s Cat, and many others.

I also came across two books by Roger Jones, Physics for the Rest of Us and Physics as Metaphor, and realised that here was a physicist with a rather different mental model of physics. Jones appeared to see the whole of physics, in a sense, as an exercise in a particular style of attribution (in a psychological sense) rather than the dissemination of unchallengeable facts. Thus whilst physics is often assumed to be describing the external world ‘out there’, Jones sees the whole edifice as internally constructed in an ‘as if’ sense.

More specifically, I noted that Physics for the Rest of Us included a chapter entitled ‘Science v. Religion’, and within that chapter there was a section entitled ‘Science as Idolatry’, which really started the ball rolling. Furthermore, I couldn’t understand why these views were so seldom expressed in popular science programmes or in the popular media. I also realised with something of a shock that Physics as Metaphor presented the entire physics edifice as a value system, based on deeply subjective and culturally determined beliefs, rather than being the objective and dispassionate search for ‘truth’ as usually supposed. Subsequently, I discovered Fritjov Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and Roseblum and Kuttner’s Quantum Enigma; and now the cat, probably Schrödinger’s, was truly out of the bag and up and running.

It was becoming clear that the accounts of physics we usually read about in the popular media or see on the TV, which purport to tell us how the world began and how everything works really, did not represent a general consensus amongst physicists. Furthermore, it seemed likely that media and TV coverage of certain issues was largely confined to giving exposure to views of physics that lent themselves to coloured pictures and the demands of so-called ‘good television’ at the expense of other less vision-friendly but equally fundamental ideas. If such were the case, then a very biased and distorted picture was being presented of an apparent consensus amongst physicists in areas where no such consensus exists, and the public was receiving a very biased picture of contemporary thinking. More to the point, I realised that when something looks and sounds mystical, it is alright to say so, witness the fact that numbers of physicists have already said similar kinds of things. So when something is mystical it stays mystical, and it is alright to make that point even when the idea comes from the mouth of a scientist rather than, say, the local vicar. Therefore, given that the fascinating books mentioned above are written by scientists whose aim is to communicate difficult theories and concepts to a larger non-specialist audience, it seems not unreasonable to provide some feedback on their endeavours from a member of their non-specialist target group, given that different viewpoints are expressed, and that nothing anybody says or writes comes from no point of view.

I regard myself as a scientist, definitely a positivist of sorts, definitely an empiricist in the sense of A.J. Ayer.[3] I have to see something happen, or at least have the strongest possible evidence that someone has seen it happen, before I will believe that thing. Concepts and ideas have to be rational and point to something which in principle at least is (or would be) replicable and demonstrable before I am content to call it a ‘fact’. Least of all do I like explanations that rely on entities without substance, or processes that, from a psychological perspective, are magical.[4]

As it happens, I have a splendid sister-in-law who is a minister of the church and who believes things that do not meet these two simple criteria where the origins of life and the birth of the universe are concerned. I have sometimes explained to her my disbelief in the idea that God made everything, and sometimes we turn to discussing the alternative explanations as presented by scientists, in terms of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life. And then a strange thing happens.

But before explaining what that strange thing is, it is necessary to be clear about one issue. I do not believe in metaphysics, no matter what its source. This book is not an attempt to salvage the wreckage of religion by deconstructing certain selected aspects of science. To argue that science is wrong or misconceived is not to argue that religion is true or well-conceived. It is purely and simply a statement that when it comes to explaining certain fundamental aspects of life and the universe both accounts, the scientific and the religious, are as nonsensical[5] as each other. Having read as far as possible both accounts, and applied the same critical criteria to both belief systems, I find them equally magical and equally unbelievable. That, maybe, is true agnosticism.

In that sense, I am now as likely to believe in God as I am to believe in the Big Bang. That is, I suffer from religion/particle-physics duality. However, as I see it, the subjective probability of either being true in anything but a metaphorical sense, whilst the same, is vanishingly small.

1 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, London: Blackwell (1953).

2 For those interested in further reading, The Myth of Addiction (Davies, J.B., 1992) gives an account of the supposed ‘fact’ of addiction in terms of functional attribution. The subject area is clearly different from the topic of this book, but the nature of functional attribution is explained in some detail.

3 Ayer, A.J., Language, Truth and Logic.

4 From a psychological perspective, ‘magical’ events are events for which an observable cause cannot be specified.

5 The word ‘nonsensical’ is used throughout this text in the sense proposed by A.J. Ayer. That is, a proposition is nonsensical when literally it contains terms which cannot be accessed by the senses.

Chapter 3: Ayers Rock

A few months ago I was sitting in a hotel bar a few kilometres from Ayers Rock. For some time my wife and I had wanted to see the famous sacred Aboriginal site, and also to experience extreme heat and see and feel what remote desert conditions were like. Blazing sun, temperatures of 47 degrees by mid-afternoon, and sunsets to die for, and… oh yes… flies. However, after four decades of living in the West of Scotland, we had more or less come to acknowledge the existence of some inexplicable force… something which physicists seem to do regularly without batting an eyelid… that made Scottish weather follow us around the globe wherever we chose to travel. Thus it was that we found ourselves sipping extortionately-priced glasses of beer and staring glumly out of a window as an endless procession of gale-driven rainstorms lashed the immediate vicinity, whilst listening to our guide explaining how lucky we were about to be, to be granted the opportunity to see Ayers Rock half hidden by a monsoon and with waterfalls running off it. The next day we did subsequently venture out, wearing polythene bin-bags, our Scottish outdoor gear having been left in Perth. It was worth it. The rock was magical. Or, if you prefer a more deterministic explanation, reinforcing in some sort of physiological way.

As chance would have it, while we were waiting we shared a table with a delightful couple from Melbourne who were similarly perplexed, after having driven for five solid days in blazing heat to get there. We got talking. It rapidly became apparent that the couple shared some religious or quasi-religious beliefs not shared by ourselves. Well, not by me at any rate. My wife has always seemed to back this issue both ways, and on reflection perhaps she is quite wise to do so. When confronted by two opposite, mutually exclusive, and equally incomprehensible accounts of the birth of the universe, it is probably better to follow either Confucious or Heisenberg, and assume that both can be simultaneously true.

It is important to explain that the couple we were talking to were not fundamentalist Christians at all. Indeed, not fundamentalist anything. In fact they were pretty switched-on people. They merely said they believed in a