Randomness & God: Templeton Prize 2008

This past march, Michal Heller was awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize, an honor that groups him with other prize winners as "entrepreneurs of the spirit"— defined by John Templeton as  outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to those aspects of human experience that, even in an age of astonishing scientific advance, remain beyond the reach of scientific explanation. (more)

I have written before about past winners, and of research sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Yet I have not found explicit writing that attempts to join together the separate strands of science and the divine through the prism of chaos until I read some of Heller's works. This may be because of his very obvious dual hats: Heller is both a cosmologist and Catholic priest, who managed to thrive in communist Poland.

Heller is really interested in the ultimate beginnings of everything. His work and speculation must necessarily include theology because his target is the start of everything before there was a Start to Everything:

Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one… (and) there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God's thinking the universe, the question on ultimate causality…: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.

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Purpose in the Universe

Storm in the Omega NebulaThe Templeton Foundation is sponsoring a fascinating, ongoing debate among scientists, humanists, and theologians concerning the ultimate question of who and what we are. Titled Does the Universe have a purpose, a diverse group of figures such as Elie Wiesel, David Gelertner, and Jane Goodall , weigh in with their opinions. Answers range from Unlikely, to Not Sure to Indeed, to I Hope So.

Even though a faith-based organization, Templeton's mission is remarkably secular:

The mission of the John Templeton Foundation is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions. These questions range from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.

Our vision is derived from John Templeton’s commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship. The Foundation’s motto “How little we know, how eager to learn” exemplifies our support for open-minded inquiry and our hope for advancing human progress through breakthrough discoveries.

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Intelligent String Theory Design - Patently Falsifiable

String Theory by Marlene Healey Prediction plays a crucial role in the continuing debate of whether string theory and intelligent design are linked by a common lack of falsifiability. Here's how this argument goes:

1) ID does not make predictions that are testable, and therefore not falsifiable, failing Popper's main criteria for categorization of a theory as scientific.

2) String Theory has not produced a prediction that is testable because it requires that there exist objects that are simply not observable - e.g extra dimensions. Therefore it is also not a scientific theory, making it analagous to ID (in a falsifiability sense).

It follow then that if you dismiss ID, you have to dismiss string theory. (See, e.g. W. Dembski's Uncommon Dissent blog)

But do you? An interesting argument against this conclusion is provided by Amanda Gefter's editorial in the Philly Inquirer titled A Scientific Leap Without the Faith. Gefter points out the distinct difference between string theory and ID as one of explanatory power combined with the internal elegance of the mathematics. In fact, it is the presence of mathematics that provides the oomph that catapults string theory over ID:

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Cosmic Legos

Escher Legos. Click to enlarge.In his book God's Universe, Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich attempts to reconcile intelligent-design and evolution. This seems to be an almost impossible task, so I was curious as to how Gingerich would approach this division.

Unfortunately, the reviews and descriptions I have read leave me bewildered because Gingerich's argument seem to be of an anticipated form, namely that God created the laws and then let everything develop on their own.

Gingerich does riff on the idea that the physical constants and various energy levels of appropriate atoms are so fine-tuned as to allow life - (shades of the anthropic principle!) that there is some "higher purpose." So what then is different in his argument from intelligent-design? God created the building blocks and the physical laws and just stood back and watched. This is not so different from the views of many scientists, so I'm not sure where Gingerich is headed that adds anything to the debate. Unfortunately, in the quotes I have read, he does seem to rely on an unsubstantiated claim of an underlying imperative for the existence of our universe, and, by extension, all of us:

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Empirical Prayers & Logical Fallacies

In Prayer: A Neurological Inquiry Skeptical Inquirer author David Haas asks "Are silent prayers transmissible to, or readable by, a supernatural being?" He then attempts to answer this question using "modern information about the brain."

Haas makes a distinction between thoughts and prayers and the underlying brain activity, stressing the non-naturalness of the prayer processes:

"The brain, an electrochemical organ, consists of matter and energy, but the mental states that are the epiphenomena of its physiological processes are neither material substances nor forms of energy ...If thoughts—including silent prayers—are not a form of energy, then there is no known natural means by which they could be transmitted beyond ourselves or read within us. "

Haas then gets to his main question - "Though thoughts and prayers are neither transmissible nor readable by any natural means, could they be known to a supernatural being?"

This is a provocative, $64,000 Question, one which cannot be answered to anyone's satisfaction, but one that leads to all sorts of meta-issues involving all-knowing and all-powerful deities.

Unfortunately, Haas trips up immediately. Here's how he wishes to answer the question of whether prayers can be known to a supernatural being:"Evidence for or against this can be obtained by determining whether prayers are followed by what was solicited by them."

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When Scientists Argue About Religion and Science

God the GeometerIn his July 2006 Addressing the public about science and religion opinion piece for Physics Today,  Murray Peshkin - a theoretical physicist at Argonne national Lab - argues passionately about the benefits of scientists addressing the boundary between religion and science in a public forum. Peshkin describes how his public appearances have led to some interesting give-and-take - learning experiences for him and his audiences.

Peshkin's position is summarized by the title and opening line of an essay published in the Chicago Tribune magazine:

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: CAN THEY LEARN TO LIVE WITH EACH OTHER?
The answer is that they can and they must, or we will all suffer the consequences.

Given the nature of the polarized debates surrounding Intelligent Design, and particularly the Dover court case, it's clear that two topics need a good deal of elaboration: describing how a scientist uses the word theory, and the need for a theory to be falsifiable in order to count as science.

Peshkin uses an interesting, and effective hypothetical situation to drive home the falsifiable idea, which leads to his main point about the inherent differences between a scientific and religious world view:

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Stem Cells as Lightning Rods

French lightning-rod experiment based on Franklin's ideas. Click to enlarge.The lightning rod is considered to be one of Benjamin Franklin's greatest inventions, combining basic scientific discovery, understanding, modeling, prediction and intuition in producing a truly life-saving device.  Certainly it is one of his most useful, and essential.  To produce such a device meant learning about the nature of lightning, which first had to be shown to be a manifestation of electricity - itself a poorly understood phenomenon in the 18th Century.  Franklin's work is part scientist, part engineer, and wholly practical - a homeowner trying to protect his house and family from the vicissitudes of electrical storms.

Some excellent sources on lightning rods and Franklin can be found in The Jan 2006 issue of Physics today (by E. Philip Krider) and at Answers.com. 

Interestingly, lightning rods were the subject of intense religious debate at that time.  In a manner not unlike the religious right's campaigning against -take your pick -genetic engineering, cloning, stem cells, etc. - research,  lightning rods were viewed as "presumptuous" because they interfered with the will of God.  Franklin had anticipated this reaction, but even his preface to the 1753 editi0n of Poor Richard's Almanac  describing the discovery of rods as a gift from God did not stem the cry.  Here's Franklin:

It has pleased God in his Goodness to Mankind, at length to discover to them the Means of securing their Habitations and other Buildings from Mischief by Thunder and Lightning.

Consider the argument against lightning rods, and what it implies about a Creator.  It is certainly a vengeful God who would not want us to protect ourselves if we could.  Given that churches  were often the sites of extreme lightning activity due to their soaring steeples and metallic bells, maybe it was natural for priests and clergy to occasionally wish that their place of worship,  rather than being a sanctuary of safety,  was instead a stage for manifestations of God's wrath. Note the paradox on the flip side of the picture, however -  God is powerful enough to cause lightning to punish earthly sinners, yet is so powerless that he couldn't come up with another method if lightning were not available?

See Franklin's Unholy Lightning Rod for more details on religious efforts to thwart the lightning rod, and the ultimate victory of Franklin's method and device.

It is natural for opponents of new, cutting-edge science to resort to scare tactics, and gloomy prognostications of the calamitous effect of unleashing unseen forces.  But conjuring up a God who will do even worse - by asserting that God will bring on Armageddon because of scientific attempts to understand nature and use it for our own well-being brings us all back to the 18th Century and before.

Without a rod, and without a reason to do all that we can to improve our health and safety.

There must be strongly enforced safeguards in all research that involves the human condition - not outright bans in the name of a vengeful creator.  As we have seen,  this stance only leads to paradoxical results about the powers, or lack thereof, of such a creator.

The Economic Modeling of Religion

I usually view economic modeling as a more asymmetric activity than, modeling in physics. In physics, models are used to both understand why something happened or happens, and predict what will happen in future circumstances - the twin pieces of understanding and prediction. This is probably a biased view on my part, or a woeful lack of knowledge of the predictive power of economic modeling, but it seems to me that most economic models I read about are more useful in explaining the past. Any extrapolation of the model into the future basically depends on assuming similar conditions. Physics models are often tested by finding out what they predict for future situations under different conditions. (I am not including econometric modeling here, which I consider to be a qualitatively different activity - it is modeling that is more empirical in the sense that data crunching is used to establish the coefficients of the model equations.)

Again, my opinion may be totally nearsighted. If it is, let me know.

I write this because of a recent book titled The Marketplace of Christianity by R.  Ekelund, Jr., R. Hebert, and R. Tollision, which was described in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Nov. 3, 2006, page A13) In the book the authors use economic analysis to describe such things as the number of different Christian churches through the centuries and the different acceptance rates of the Protestant Reformation.

Some of the models, at least as reported by the Chronicle, seem very far-fetched - a huge, Procrustean stretch, if you will.

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Scientific Methodology vs. Prayer: And the winner is...

A fractal-like prayer rugMy post on March 19, 2006, described the Templeton Foundation, whose mission is to

"pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science through a rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused methodology."

The Templeton Foundation appears to do a creditable job in following their mission. But what happens when scientific methodology meets faith-based belief and science wins (or appears to win)? The clash between religion and science, most recently in full view during the Dover evolution vs. intelligent design imbroglio, is much more subtle, but still inescapably present.

A case in point is the recent "rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused study" funded by the Foundation attempting to find the effect of prayer on healing. Titled STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) , researchers studied the effects of prayer on 1,800 patients recovering from heart bypass surgery. The results, published in March 2006 and published in the American Heart Journal did not find any statistically significant effects.

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On Science & Religion - John Barrow Wins the 2006 Templeton Prize

John Barrow, mathematician/physicist from Cambridge University, has been named the winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize.

The Templeton Prize is awarded "for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities." The judges who award the prize favor those whose work leads to communication between scientific and religious spheres. Barrow, a prolific writer (17 books and 400+ articles) often writes about the mysteries of the universe, the nature of physical laws, and mathematical truth. From the Templeton Prize announcement:

The hallmark of his work is a deep engagement with those aspects of the structure of the universe and its laws that make life possible and which shape the views that we take of that universe when we examine it. The vast elaboration of that simple idea has lead to a huge expansion of the breadth and depth of the dialogue between science and religion.

In particular, Barrow's engagement with frontier science and mathematics, developing multidisciplinary perspectives on subjects such as the mysteries of nothingness and infinity, and the potentially intelligible realms of the laws of Nature and the limits of scientific explanation, has jarred religious and scientific perspectives in such a way as to open pathways of understanding which may allow both to comprehend each other more fully.

Barrow is the author of The Mathematical Universe - a 1989 article that I have used as one of the main readings for the Chaos and Fractals course. This article usually generates very strong student opinions because Barrow describes major philosophy of mathematics movements of the 20th century: realism, formalism, inventionism, and constructivism. The students then write a reflective journal piece on how they would classify their mathematical stance. This is often followed by a lively seminar session whose themes reverberate throughout the semester. (Not surprising, most students have never considered this, and, while most claim to be mathematical realists, there are always one or two each semester that are intrigued by inventionism.)

I've read 3 of Barrow's books - The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (with FJ Tipler), The World Within the World, and Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation - and they have all been memorable for their depth and extraordinary range of topics. Barrow is an excellent and provocative writer.

Barrow has been richly rewarded for his work - The Templeton Prize award is $1.4 million - more than the Nobel prize. Sir John Templeton is a mutual funds pioneer, and is described as "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century" by Money Magazine.

There is also a local angle to this story: the Templeton Prize is administered by the Templeton Foundation, based in West Conshohocken, Pa. The Foundation does much more than just the Templeton Prize, funding other awards, special projects, and lecture series around the world. (See the web site for details, including grant opportunities and application procedures.)

The Foundation takes a carefully-worded stance on intelligent design, attempting to find a middle-ground that is not politically or ideologically compromised. (Click here for the statement.) I'm not sure that the statement succeeds - I believe that it is much more inviting for intelligent-design supporters because of the following claim:

Thus while it is our judgment that the general process of
biological evolution is well attested by many lines of research, it is not clear to what extent the process of evolution or the study of the history of life on earth may reveal hints of broader cosmic, perhaps even divine, purpose and intention.

Nevertheless, the entire Templeton effort is a much-needed attempt to bridge the science-religion divide, rather than use the natural division as a polarizing wedge between the two camps. Choosing John Barrow is good evidence that the Templeton program lives up to its stated goals.