How Science could disprove a Creator

Or at the very least — an intelligent one.

Humans are so homocentric. We don’t see the brain for the face, the nerve center for the brain, the cell for the nerve center, or the ampiphilic compound for the cell.

What is clear from all that we observe is that systems simple and complex have indeed arisen that partially shut themselves off from outside influences, and it seems this is necessary to cause intelligence – as opposed to the reverse assumption in Theology.

Within many fields, ranging from cosmology to systems in physics to information theory, entropy or randomness is the measure of low order or low systemization. As atoms have assembled to molecules where they can, the trend is from high entropy to low entropy, according to thermodynamics predicting a heat death of the Universe.

With heat sufficing as Creator, we have indeed seen the necessary elements arise for forming molecules, and a few star generations later, the elements necessary for life and intelligence. (As anecdotal and somewhat sketchy evidence for intelligence, our very own homocentric Solar System clocks in at the third star generation.)

I see from this a chance to be more intelligent than a possible Creator. Our Solar System is ~4.5Gyr old, and Homo Sapiens was born yesterday. We have billions of years to synthesize an element that our star generation and therefore our rumored Creator could not.

Maximilion

The lighter elements discovered very recently – in just a few centuries – as naturally occurring, we look to transuranic elements. Neptunium and Plutonium have been synthesized, but have also found naturally occurring within our solar system. Perhaps Technetium, but alas! Predicted by Isaac Asimov to occur naturally in decaying radioactive ore, this element is detected.

The hunt for the right element is on! Perhaps this has already happened without thought of implicating these two properties normally attributed to a Creator:

1. If we have created an element, or do so within say the next couple billion years, much faster than He could, the Creator is not powerful.
2. Furthermore, that if the Creator is some abstract such as high entropy, He is the opposite of intelligent. Not only is Theology left with only Deology and is so close to Cosmology that it should look to physics as Creator, but proponents of Intelligent Design in particular would have to look away from their Creator, and also away from observational evidence, for support of such.

In other words, we have billions of years to rise above the hell-fire, heat, high-entropy, random process of what created us, the Universe, and every system in it, from microscopic to macroscopic.

Perhaps we homocentric humans (or at least a select few specimens!) are already Intelligent Synthesists?

If so, a Creator (abstract or not) imagined by believers as some lowly magician only subservient to our psychological needs providing out of thin air the building blocks of life and intelligence, is ineligible as Catch-all and First Cause for debates on the topic of Creation.

Is there intelligent life in the Universe?

I write the question to include humans, because irony makes you look at yourself, and this will be highly relevant, as you will see.

I like the Closer to Truth interviews, this one perhaps to short to raise expectations, yet I reflect on why Carr appears so strikingly unconvincing here. The take-away is that he brings up the wrong arguments and balances them with other wrong arguments to arrive at a hunch, and this is the nub.

The Drake “equation” and various uniqueness arguments apply less and less as data comes in. This should normally be a sign that something is wrong, yet they’re brought up.

Surely, if we are intelligent and are to speculate and form principles, it should be from data? (Rather than as Drake later admitted, making up factors and multiplying them together. What the factors are doesn’t matter, as long as there are enough of them it will result in a low number, as Carr and Drake well knew.)

The best way for this seizure on our minds to end, and to form the best prediction we could make, is to project the data we have onto our knowledge about the Universe:

1. We know that it takes a certain number of billions of years for the correct generation of stars to expel the heavier elements needed for Life Chemistry to occur.
2. We have a measured sample of Earth-like planets defined by just this Chemistry.
3. We have a sample of 1 as to how long it takes for this Chemistry to evolve Intelligent Life (if we say so ourselves). In this one sample, Intelligent Life survived asteroids and multiple orders, even classes extinctions, and unintelligent world wars.

The reasonable speculation would be to project the data we have, for a low estimate of how many solar systems are as unintelligent as we are – having built no observable structures, having financed no radio beacons into space, and having ventured a measly few kilometers into space. – If anything, the Universe is behaving as expected, “today”.

The natural thought from this, however, is more intriguing.

If we follow the same Universal Chemistry principles that we follow in gathering all of our knowledge about the Universe, the prediction should be that all planets suitable for Life Chemistry have evolved for as long as we have, and is therefore ready to do all the things we expect of ourselves to make ourselves noticed at this star generation age.

So, the natural expectation would rather be that Intelligent Life is roughly where we are on the cosmological clock of chemical reactions, measured by star generations, each on their individual planet, and is as ready to explode onto the scene as we are. On the Cosmological time scale, I think a 100,000 years long explosion could be considered a true explosion.

As for “them” not communicating randomly with everyone, the general answer is, again: “do all the things we expect of ourselves to make ourselves noticed” as per above, but within this answer, there are many more answers.

One such answer could well be that they solved their habitation problems, and simply don’t need to reach out, or expand.

The God-fearing Determinist*, Part 3

Jokes are good fun, but even satire can reveal that the question is not a simple one, even one that could lead to paradoxes. More fun:

Take the First Cause Quiz!

(Click the image for the PDF version of the quiz below – to find out what you believe in. This quiz emulates theistic epistemology and may therefore contain nuts, and traces of false dichotomies. Put tongue in cheek before ingesting.)

1. If something popped into existence without a cause / always existed, was it created? -No. (If Yes, we need to find a new word for this peculiar phenomenon; it is the definition of the word; but even if a new word is defined, it will not carry the meaning of “Creation performed by a Creator”;it would necessarily follow that God didn’t create the Universe. He “something-else’d” the Universe.)

2. Do some things pop into existence / always exist? -Yes. (If No, God didn’t create the Universe; it unfolded by cause and effect.)

3. Did the Universe pop into existence without a cause / always exist, or did something cause it to begin to exist? -Yes. (If No, God didn’t create the Universe.)

4. So you affirm some events require a previous cause but some don’t, and that the Universe is one of the things that require a previous cause. Is that previous cause an act of God? -Yes. (If No, God didn’t create the Universe.)

5. Did the Creator pop into existence spontaneously / always exist, or did something cause the Creator? -No. (If Yes, God plays the intermediary Creator, a role not portrayed in mainstream religions.)

6. So you’re unsatisfied with an uncreated Universe as First Cause. Is an uncreated Creator a better answer? -Yes. (If No, you’ve understood something important – why someone doesn’t have to be Atheist or even a skeptic to question your religion’s origins claims.)

7. Despite all the other causes previously ascribed to acts of God having been replaced with actual knowledge of how reality works, leaving you only the cause for the Big Bang, can you substantiate that this cause is an act of God? -Yes. (If No, you don’t know that God created the Universe, and the argument ends.)

8. Are these substantiations abstract arguments that suspiciously fit exactly what is left to be explained before the Big Bang? -No. (If Yes, several competing, and not necessarily divine origin, theories could fill the gap, and you don’t know that the one involving your God is the correct one.)

9. Accepting all your substantiations as true, you have still only shown that this is an act of a God. Can you identify the Creator of the Universe with the deity of your own religion? -Yes. (If No, you don’t know that your God created the Universe, and the argument ends.)

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OK, phew. The quiz is over! If you didn’t make it past the last question, you should display intellectual honesty by admitting that you don’t know if your God created the Universe.

If you did, you should submit your arguments and any evidence and references for peer review. If some of them are refuted soundly, you should display intellectual honesty by abandoning deeply held convictions that rest on them in order to show that you are interested in seeing truths – just as Scientists do for (perhaps) much more rigorously researched theories than yours. Or, of course, defend your argument.

“If something is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. And if you can’t find out whether it’s true or it isn’t, you should suspend judgment.”

Bertrand Russell

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This article series continues with part 4, which will deal with false dichotomies, show how an open question on the subject might be phrased, and the relation of any educated guess, answer, explanation, or theory to reality.