The Goldilocks Enigma – Part Three

 By Laura Knight-Jadczyk

In the previous post, it was noted that Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ was early seized upon as the one and only underlying law of our reality: random processes of matter, no consciousness needed, and it has been the steady application of this perspective that underlies that chaos and disorder we now experience in a world declared to be devoid of information and organization.

The materialist solution to the appearance of design is to postulate Laws of Nature. Davies then asks the obvious question: “Where do the laws of nature come from?... How can they be explained?”

I briefly recounted the development of the idea that there were/are Laws of Nature and then recounted an exchange between Ark and Robin Amis about the differences between Science and Religion which concluded that perhaps, a marriage between the strengths of science and mysticism might be the way to go.

I concluded with Davies noting that the Universe certainly reveals that there is a cohesive scheme of things but most scientists do not consider that evidence for meaning or purpose. Davies wrote:

Of course, scientists might be deluded in their belief that they’re finding systematic and coherent truth in the workings of nature.  Ultimately there may be no reason at all for why things are the way they are.  But that would make the universe a fiendishly clever bit of trickery.  Can a truly absurd universe so convincingly mimic a meaningful one?

And then I concluded with Davies setting himself the task of Explaining the Universe.  The question is: will his explanations result in any change of perspective?  Will he conclude that there is no meaning or purpose or will he find that the evidence is overwhelming for meaning and purpose?

Davies says that the science of cosmology really only came into its own on 11 February 2003 when the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe map was created and published.

A full-sky map produced by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) showing cosmic background radiation, a very uniform glow of microwaves emitted by the infant universe more than 13 billion years ago. Colour differences indicate tiny fluctuations in the intensity of the radiation, a result of tiny variations in the density of matter in the early universe. According to inflation theory, these irregularities were the “seeds” that became the galaxies. WMAP's data support the big bang and inflation models, and cosmic microwave background is at the farthest limits of the observable universe. ~ NASA/WMAP Science Team

Apparently, the importance of this map consisted in the fact that it showed that, on the largest scale of size, there is order and uniformity in the Universe.  This suggests that the laws of physics are identical far out in the universe. 

Only in the past few decades have astronomers been able to measure the scale of the thing.  Our sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy: the Milky Way.  The Milky Way galaxy is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies.  The gaps between stars are so large they are measured in light years: the distance light travels in a year at 186K miles per second.  One light year is about 6 trillion miles or 10 trillion kilometers.  The furthest galaxies imaged by the Hubble telescope are over 10 billion light years away.

Eighty years before the WMAP map was achieved, astronomers Edwin Hubble and Vesto Slipher studied light from many galaxies and found that the further away they were, the redder the light was. It was already known that light from receding sources is stretched and shifted to the red end of the spectrum while light from an approaching source is shifted the other way, toward the blue end of the spectrum. Apparently, the red shift got bigger the further away from us a galaxy was.  Moreover, it appeared that the effect – the red shift – was the same in all directions.  So, Hubble announced that obviously, the galaxies are all rushing away from us in an orderly pattern of expansion.  The conclusion drawn from this observation and analysis was that: if the universe is expanding now, it must have been compressed in the past.  And so, using the measured rate of expansion, they ran the movie backwards and decided that all the galaxies had been squeezed into one place at some point, and the universe must have begun with a big explosion; enter The Big Bang.  The date of this event was estimated to be 13.7 billion years ago.

Here Davies notes that the term ‘Big Bang’ was derogatory, having been coined by Fred Hoyle who never accepted the theory laid out above. But, never mind since the next conclusion was that, if the pre-Big Bang universe was all compressed into one spot, then it was certainly very hot.  Like REALLY hot, since matter heats up when it is compressed and cools when expanded and we are talking about serious compression here.  That being the case, we should expect the heat from the birth of the universe to have left a faint glow of radiation after 13.7 billion years. Apparently, that is what was found by radio engineers from Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.  In 1967 they came across radiation coming from space that they soon identified as the expected relic of the big bang.  This radiation is evenly distributed across the sky at a temperature of 2.725 K which works out to be minus 270 degrees C.  Since radiation at this very cold temperature is in the microwave region of the EM spectrum, this has been named ‘cosmic microwave background’ or CMB. 

Temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation after the dipole pattern (due to the Solar System's motion relative to the rest of the Universe) and the strong emission from the Milky Way galaxy have been removed. Based on 4 years of data from COBE.

Astronomers were able to measure the precise spectrum of the cosmic background radiation and this resulted in the following graphic representation that Davies calls ‘the smoking gun’:

The above graph is based on the measurements made by the WMAP satellite and shows how the heat energy left over from the Big Bang is distributed across a range of wavelengths.  Davies tells us that the shape of the curve is distinctive, corresponding precisely to the spectrum of radiation from a system at a uniform temperature.  This, then, suggests that the CMB originated from a state of thermodynamic equilibrium in the distant past.  Conclusively, the observations fit the Big Bang theory precisely.  And the implication is that the material of the early universe must have been smoothly and evenly distributed through space at the same density and temperature everywhere.  That is, it was mightily compressed and astonishingly hot through and through!  The graph above appears to confirm that the universe began in a hot, dense, uniform state, and from which is expanded and cooled to become what it is today.

Well, the early form of the universe apparently wasn’t totally and completely uniform because there is ‘clumping’ such as aggregations of galaxies.  If the pre-bang universe had been completely and perfectly uniform, there would be no structure, but at the same time, even small initial irregularities would have been amplified by gravity and that would have resulted in an early catastrophic collapse if it were not also expanding which counters the tendency for aggregation. Davies writes:

Calculations of these competing effects indicate that to grow galaxies distributed in the observed manner, the universe must have started out with density variations of about one part in 1000,000.  Because denser gas is more compressed it is hotter, so irregularities in density translate into irregularities in temperature.  So the early universe should have possessed tiny temperature variations, if the big bang theory is to hang together consistently.  And that is precisely what WMAP found.

So the story goes something like this.  The universe began 13.7 billion years ago with a big bang.  The state of the early universe was one of extremely hot and dense, ionized, opaque, expanding gas suffused with heat radiation.  The gas was distributed through space with almost but not quite perfect uniformity.  By about 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe had cooled to a few thousand degrees, and at this point the gas de-ionized (i.e. the nuclei and electrons combined into atoms) as a result of which it became transparent.  The heat radiation thereafter was largely unaffected by its passage through matter, and it has travelled almost freely ever since.  Therefore, when astronomers detect the CMB they are glimpsing the universe as it was about 380,000 years after the big band.  In effect, the CMB is a snapshot of what the universe was like when it was less than 0.003 per cent of its present age.  The tiny variations in temperature detected by WMAP represent the seeds of cosmic structure without which there would have been no galaxies, stars, planets – or astronomers.  So this is another one of those ‘convenient’ facts that makes the universe bio-friendly, and which needs explaining.

There are, however, some additional things that must be taken into account.  First of all, if the Big Bang was the explosion of a compact ball of matter floating in some kind of void, there would be a center.  If there were a center, then some galaxies would be in the middle and others would be on the outside edge and then, empty space. But that is not what is seen through our telescopes.  What is seen is something like 100 billion galaxies distributed uniformly with none of them clustering up around a ‘center’ and no apparent thinning of the arrangements at any outer edges.  That means that there is no systematic flow of galaxies out from any particular location.  All of the galaxies move away from all others at the same rate and everywhere you look the space between the galaxies gets bigger and bigger as time goes on.  The observer’s impression of being located at the center is an illusion because everything is all moving away from everything else and no part of the sky has any big glow of primordial radiation which it would have if the Big Bang had happened at a given point in space.

How to explain this? Cosmologists have made some attempts including the following cited by Davies:

·       Space is in the universe rather than the universe being in space.

·       The big bang happened everywhere, not at one point in space.

·       The big bang was the explosion of space, not an explosion in space.

Davies uses the analogy of a string of elastic with beads attached.  As you stretch the elastic, the beads are farther and farther apart. There is a somewhat better image on the net here: called the Expanding Balloon Analogy by Prof. Ned Wright :

The trick is to think of space as being elastic and capable of being stretched.  This capacity of space to stretch, to curve or warp is the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  And so, the apparent movement of galaxies away from each other appears to be the expanding of the space between them. 

There are questions about this, too.  Maybe we can’t see a center or an edge because our telescopes are not powerful enough to see that far?  Or, maybe the universe is infinite in all directions.  Davies notes that the simplest default assumption is that what you see is what you get everywhere: there is an infinite number of galaxies extending through infinite space forever and ever.

The uniformity of space that is seen no matter which way you look is referred to as the cosmological principle which is an application of a more general principle: the principle of mediocrity, or there is nothing special or privileged about our location in the universe.

Also notice that the balloon universe depicted above demonstrates that the universe can be finite in volume without having a center or an edge.  Of course, thinking about a balloon configured universe makes some of us wonder who is blowing up the balloon??? 

Not exactly how we normally imagine the Big Bang!  On that thought, I’ll end today’s post.  More next week. 

The Goldilocks Enigma – Part Two

 by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

In the previous post where I introduced Paul Davies book “The Goldilocks Enigma” which appears to be one of the sources of Philip Goff’s rather shallow musings on ‘The Purpose of the Universe’, I cited Davies’ briefly from his discussion about ‘The Big Questions’.  There he noted that “The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written in a subtle mathematical code.  This cosmic code contains the secret rules on which the universe runs.”

I added the context that the ancients thought that knowing or inferring something about ultimate reality can help an individual to live a better life in some sense, thus, the development of various religions, though I mentioned Christianity specifically.

What developed from this drive to understand ultimate reality, within the parameters of science as we know it today, was the materialist assumption that the physical world is causally closed and free will is just an illusion. I then noted that, for this belief system to make any sense, materialists needed their own creation myth to explain the complexity of human life, experience and consciousness which Philip Goff was exerting himself to provide based on Darwinism.  Goff struggled with the fact that, if the physical universe is causally closed and we have no free will, then our consciousness is entirely useless and certainly not advantageous for survival.  He did some fancy cogitation in an effort to overcome this implication, suggesting that the Universe can have ‘purpose’ even if it is a materialist universe.  He combined his ‘pan-agentialism’ with ‘teleological laws’ to come up with ‘Cosmic purposivism’ which just happens to coincide nicely with liberal-left political aims. In short, Goff described a Big Bang that was as much Creationism as the “God did it” version.  As I noted,  for Goff, the Wave Function is something like a deciding god who then castrates himself and Goff gives us no idea where the wave function comes from, nor what gives particles ‘agency’.

As I noted, based on research in mathematics and physics, there is clearly much more to our reality than the naive realism upon which Darwinism and neo-Darwinism is based. And it’s not that there aren’t some elements of natural selection in play; clearly there are.  But it is the way that the principles have been applied: Natural selection was seized upon as the one and only underlying law of our reality as a whole: random processes of matter, no consciousness needed. And it has been the steady application of this materialistic evolutionary thinking that is behind the explanation of the order of the universe that prevails today, which underpins the chaos and disorder we see in a world devoid of information and organization. 

Burkhard Heim & 12 Dimensional World

How can this be in a world where science has uncovered the existence of a network of complex coded mathematical relationships beneath the diverse physical systems making up our reality? Paul Davies writes:

How has this come about?  Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension.  Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make, not just life, not just mind, but understanding.  The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unravel the plot. What is it that enables something as small and delicate and adapted to terrestrial life as the human brain to engage with the totality of the cosmos and the silent mathematical tune to which it dances. … Could it just be a fluke?

Here we encounter the concept of Laws of the Universe or Nature.  These laws did not develop in a void.  In earliest times, people observed the cycles of nature and the stars.  Religions posited a created world order.  The Greeks proposed that the world could be explained by logic and reason.  Modern science emerged from the Christian belief that there was only one true god, one Truth, and the Greek philosophical position that logic and reason could get us there.  And so, as Davies points out, the founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd, but rather underpinned by a coherent scheme of things, a system of well-defined laws. Davies writes:

Right at the outset we encounter an obvious and profound enigma: Where do the laws of nature come from?... If they aren’t the product of divine providence, how can they be explained?

In earlier times, these laws were seen to be ‘thoughts of God’ or derived from God’s role as law-maker and keeper of order. After Darwin, of course, it could be suggested that nobody needed God to create things; natural selection did that very well.  Of course, as I have noted, that just put the problem off several steps.  But in any event, today the ‘laws of physics’ are central to science and foundational to physical reality.  These laws have been discovered and described bit by bit over hundreds of years. 

Galileo supposedly dropped balls off the tower at Pisa and discovered that the distance the ball falling increases as the square of the time.  Davies asks the obvious question: Why is there such a mathematical rule?  Where does the rule come from? And why is the rule as it is and not something else?

Why does the force between magnets diminish with the cube of the distance between them?  Why is it so that if you double the volume of a fixed mass of gas while keeping the temperature constant, its pressure is halved? (Boyle’s Law)  Why is it so that the square of the period of an orbit is proportional to the cube of the orbit’s radius? (Kepler’s law)  Why is it so that the force of gravity diminishes with distance as the square of the separation between the two bodies?

We could say that the physical world conforms to mathematical laws or that mathematics and laws emerge from the behavior of objects in the physical world.  Chicken or egg?  Does it matter?.  By using Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, engineers can figure out when a space craft will arrive at point B after departing from point A. And it always works.  Whatever the origin of the world – matter or mind – the mathematical models of reality appear to always describe what actually happens in the real world.  Davies captures the deep mystery: “Why is Nature shadowed by a mathematical reality?”

So, the next question is: How many laws are there? It turns out that many of the laws are not independent.  Davies writes:

Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion explain Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, and so are in some sense deeper and more powerful.  Newton’s laws of motion also explain Boyle’s law of gases when they are applied in a statistical way to a large collection of chaotically moving molecules.  … The laws of electricity … were found to be connected to the laws of magnetism, which in turn explained the laws of light.  These interconnections led to a certain amount of confusion about which laws were ‘primary’ and which could be derived from others.  Physicists began talking about ‘fundamental’ laws and ‘secondary’ laws… This streamlining and repackaging process – finding links between laws, and reducing them to ever more fundamental laws – continues apace, and it’s tempting to believe that, at rock bottom, there is just a handful of truly fundamental laws, possibly even a single super-law, from which all the other laws derive. 

The idea of Laws of Nature resulted from recording and codifying observations of patterns in nature, i.e. physical events.  Somewhere along the way, the laws themselves became the reality rather than the events they described.  The laws of physics became abstractions within their own realm and only touch our world when they ‘act’.  Davies writes:

It’s almost as if the laws are lying in wait, ready to seize control of a physical process and compel it to comply… So we have this image of really-existing laws of physics ensconced in a transcendent eyrie, lording it over lowly matter.

Of course, that means that the ‘laws of physics’ are part of the impersonal forces and natural physical processes rather than the observed expressions of purposive supernatural actors or events.  Note what I wrote above: “We could say that the physical world conforms to mathematical laws or that mathematics and laws emerge from the behavior of objects in the physical world.  Chicken or egg?”  Scientific explanations seem to win hands down. Science tells us that the madness of rabies is caused by the cascade of events resulting from an infection by a virus rather than possession by a demon.  But for all we know, (and I’m only being partly facetious here), the rabies virus is merely the agent of a devil.

There is a lot that science doesn’t know and cannot explain. Davies tells us:

Many scientists who are struggling to construct a fully comprehensive theory of the physical universe openly admit that part of the motivation is to finally get rid of God, whom they view as a dangerous and infantile delusion.  And not only God, but any vestige of God-talk, such as ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ or ‘design’ in nature.  These scientists see religion as so fraudulent and sinister that nothing less than total theological cleansing will do.  They concede no middle ground, and regard science and religion as two implacably opposed world views.  Victory is assumed to be the inevitable outcome of science’s intellectual ascendancy and powerful methodology. …

At the level of popular, Sunday-school Christianity, God is portrayed simplistically as a sort of Cosmic Magician, conjuring the world into being from nothing and from time to time working miracles to fix problems.  Such a being is obviously in flagrant contradiction to the scientific view of the world.  The God of scholarly theology, by contrast, is cast in the role of a wise Cosmic Architect whose existence is manifested through the rational order of the cosmos, an order that is in fact revealed by science.  That sort of God is largely immune from scientific attack.

So here, I would like to include an exchange Ark had with Robin Amis, editor and publisher of the three volumes of Gnosis by Boris Mouravieff.  In the exchange, Ark will cite what Amis wrote to him:

Ark to Robin Amis:

You stated that:

1) Scientific method has its limitations.

2) Knowledge should be understood in broader terms so as to include, for instance “noetic knowledge”. In particular:

a) there is a true form of knowledge that is normally associated with religion

b) those with intellectual training tend to regard it as not being knowledge at all

3) That you - Praxis - teach this other form of knowledge, and the conditions under which it can be understood.

4) The reason that Praxis (and other religions) depends on a suspension of judgment is “that newcomers studying this material, despite quickly getting confirmation of its reality, will not understand it deeply enough.”

I will try to address and expand the above points and, perhaps, try to add some new ideas, if only for the future discussion.

Point 1) I agree. I agree completely. In fact it takes a scientist to truly know the limitations and the weaknesses of science, as many of the tricks and games and even lies are known only to the insiders - scientists.

Point 2) I agree that there is such a knowledge; I agree that is important and, in fact, is crucial.  It depends on whether you start with a fact and follow the clues to real knowledge, or whether you start with an assumption, and interpret all facts based on what may, at the very beginning, be a lie.

a) Whether this “true knowledge” is, was, or should be “associated with religion” is disputable.

The term “associated” is somewhat vague and can lead to misunderstandings. Science is also associated with religion. The Pope has scientific advisers; the Vatican supports scientific research.

On the other hand the greatest crimes of history have also been - and probably are still - associated with religion, one way or another.

Religion, if analyzed sincerely and critically, has many dark spots, and analyzing the reasons for this is not an easy task.

But I hope you will agree with me that one of the reasons why religions have these dark spots is that people were lulled into believing that they have (in opposition to others) the “true knowledge”.

So the very concept of “true knowledge” is risky. It is easy to imagine that two different people will have different, orthogonal truths. For one the truth may be that he needs to kill the other man, while for the other man the truth may involve avoiding being killed. Every noetic truth has down-to-earth implications. Or so I think.

b) Though I agree that what you wrote may describe a general tendency, yet there are exceptions. History knows scientists - great scientists - that were “mystics” at the same time. Pascal, Newton, Poincare - just few examples. So, indeed, the term “tend to regard” that you used seems to be appropriate. But for this present point, it is important to know whether there is a real contradiction between being a scientist and appreciating other forms of knowledge at the same time. It seems to me and, I believe, you will agree, that there is no intrinsic contradiction.

Point 3) Here of course you are assuming that Praxis is already in possession of such a knowledge. Perhaps this is the case or, perhaps, Praxis has only “fragments of unknown teachings”, and not the complete picture.

Being a scientist I am always careful and I would never state that I have the full and complete “knowledge” of something. I may know about tools, theories, formal structures, data etc. But one day, all my tools, data, theories and formal structures may prove to be wrong or useless with the uncovering of a single datum that shifts the entire structure. A true scientist MUST be open to this. What is important in science is being always open to surprises, to new paradigm shifts etc.

So, I think, you - Praxis - are teaching what you BELIEVE to be, at the present moment, “the true knowledge”, and you may have very good reasons for such a belief. You may have very important pieces of knowledge but, perhaps, you are still lacking some of other important pieces.

How can we know in advance where the next unexpected discovery will lead us?

And here I would like to make some constructive - or so I think - comments.

Looking at the history of our civilization, religion seems to have been in existence much longer than science. And yet we see that religion has failed. In spite of its teachings people are still constantly at war with each other. Human beings have not become better, and they are often much worse than animals. Gurdjieff described seeing the truth of our condition - the condition of our reality in general - as the “terror of the situation.” It is terrible because, when you really SEE it, you realize how great a failure religion or the “powers” of the various versions of God really are.

Science, which came later and has exploded in the last millennium, has failed too. It has brought mankind to the edge of self-destruction. Advances in mathematical, physical and computer sciences have brought about “applied game theory“, where “wars” are called “games”, and to “win the game” is to kill as many people as possible with as little cost as possible.

Is there any hope at all? And if there is, then where?

Perhaps it is time to try something new? Perhaps a “marriage of science and mysticism“ has a chance?

Why not take what is good from science and what is good from religion, and discard what is wrong?

What is the best thing about religion?

Religion teaches us to be open minded and accepting of possibilities which are far from being “rational”. Religions teach us to pay attention to singular events, miracles, phenomena that are fragile and hardly repeatable. Finally religion teaches us to look inside as much as outside: know thyself.

The strengths of the approach of religion just happen to be the weak points in science.

Science is often narrow-minded and conservative restricting everything to what is material and rigidly repeatable. Science teaches us that what is “out there” is not connected to what is “in here,” that it must be captured, weighed, measured and manipulated. That is why new paradigms are so painful when they come - but they DO come in science, and they seldom come in religion which is “fixed” and dogmatic and not open to discussion.

What is the best thing about science?

Science is open to criticism and discussion. Even if many forces on the earth try to make a sort of religion of science, in general, scientific theories must be published and publicly discussed. We can find an error in Einstein‘s papers because these, as well as other papers, are publicly available. Everyone can learn mathematics, as advanced as you wish, from reading monographs, articles, going to conferences, and discussing with other scientists.

The strength of science just happens to be the weakness of religion. Religions are always “secret” in one respect or another - even if that secrecy is only the declaration that no changes can be made, no questions asked, because the ultimate truth about God is a “mystery,” a “secret.” That is why the teachings of religion are so easily distorted and misunderstood. It is so easy for the central “authority” to achieve the “pinnacle” of the religion and declare to the followers the correct interpretation and that no other is permitted.

Point 4) What you say about students not being able to judge for a long time is certainly true. But whether discouraging them from such judgments is the only solution - I am not sure.

Certainly that was the way it was done in the past. Groups were usually small, whether exoteric or esoteric. Travel and communication possibilities were severely restricted. But today a qualitative change has occurred: we are now in the era of networking and instant communication on a planetary scale.

Therefore a different approach is possible: instead of having few students and “teach them even when they are not yet ready”, we can address ourselves to those who are ready.

This was not so easy to do in the past when teachers communicated, at best, to merely hundreds of potential students. But it is possible now, when we can communicate with millions.

Whoever is not yet ready for the next stage, let him stay where he is or go back where he was. Those who ARE ready, will find you - if you take care and NETWORK efficiently.

So, I would not discourage students from making early judgments and discussing subjects that they are not prepared for. If they come to the wrong conclusions and go away or attack you, that is their free will. Let them go where their minds and their hearts lead them.

Coming back now to Davies, he notes that even atheists can feel awe in respect of the cosmos.  They even note that it does, indeed, appear that there is a purpose that evolution is following.  We certainly got that from Goff, though I suspect he got it from Davies and others. As noted above, this is what inspired his Cosmic Purposivism.

Davies points out that that 1) the universe ‘obeys’ (or expresses?) mathematical laws; 2) these mathematical laws underlie everything and some scientists think they are real and inhabit a transcendent Platonic realm; 3) Science reveals that there is a cohesive scheme of things, but they do not consider that to be evidence for meaning or purpose.  Davies writes:

Of course, scientists might be deluded in their belief that they’re finding systematic and coherent truth in the workings of nature.  Ultimately there may be no reason at all for why things are the way they are.  But that would make the universe a fiendishly clever bit of trickery.  Can a truly absurd universe so convincingly mimic a meaningful one?

And so, Davies sets himself the task of explaining the Universe.   We'll begin synopsizing next post.

The Goldilocks Enigma

 

It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold and its forces act together in a way that’s just right; why does the universe seem so perfectly tailor-made for life to exist?

by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

In his book aptly titled “The Goldilocks Enigma”, physicist and science writer, Paul Davies, says that some scientists claim to be on the verge of providing answers to the great questions of existence such as Why are we here? How did the universe begin?  How will it end?  How is the world put together?  Why is it the way it is? And so on.  We recognize these questions from Philip Goff’s rather feeble attempt to philosophize about them in the previous series of posts: “Why? The Meaning of the Universe”.  Here I’ll just suggest that the reader will be better served reading Davies over Goff even if I don’t think Davies has the whole banana either.

Davies explains that the reason some scientist are so confident about the possibility of being able to explain the order of the universe is due to developments in both cosmology and high energy particle physics.  However, elsewhere, Davies has warned us against ‘Taking Science on Faith’  because the faith scientists have in the immutability of physical laws has origins in Christian theology. (He was roundly criticized for saying this).

Davies thinks that the fact that consciousness exists is one of the most significant facts of the universe, (he also notes that many scientists and philosophers do not agree with this assessment), and that for life to emerge and then to evolve into conscious beings like ourselves, certain conditions have to be met.

Davies worked with astronomer, Fred Hoyle, and tells us that Hoyle thought that it appears as if some super-intelligence was behind the laws of physics.  Davies agrees that it does look that way and no scientific explanation for the universe can be acceptable unless it accounts for this fact. “On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings.  

Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be ‘just right’ for life, in many intriguing ways.”  Figuring out why this is so requires us to probe the nature of physical laws. Davies writes:

“Throughout history, prominent thinkers have been convinced that the everyday world observed through our senses represents only the surface manifestation of a deeper hidden reality, where the answers to the great questions of existence should be sought.  So compelling has been this belief that entire societies have been shaped by it.  Truth-seekers have practiced complex rituals and rites, used drugs and medication to enter trance-like states, and consulted shamans, mystics, and priests in an attempt to lift the veil on a shadowy world that lies beneath the one we perceive.  The world ‘occult' originally meant ‘knowledge of concealed truth’, and seeking a gateway to the occult domain has been a major preoccupation of all cultures, ranging from the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australians to the myth of Adam and Eve tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. …

“The ancient Greek philosopher Plato compared the world of appearance to a shadow playing on the wall of a cave.  Followers of Pythagoras were convinced that numbers possess mystical significance.  The Bible is also replete with numerology… The power of numbers led to a belief that certain integers, geometrical shapes and formulas could invoke contact with a supernatural plane, and that obscure codes known only to initiates might unlock momentous cosmic secrets. …

“Isaac Newton – mystic, theologian and alchemist – … did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science. …

“The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written in a subtle mathematical code.  This cosmic code contains the secret rules on which the universe runs.  Newton, Galileo and other early scientists treated their investigations as a religious quest.  They thought that by exposing the patterns woven into the processes of nature they truly were glimpsing the mind of God.  Modern scientists are mostly not religious, yet they still accept that an intelligible script underlies the workings of nature, for to believe otherwise would undermine the very motivation for doing research, which is to uncover something meaningful about the world that we don't already know.”

There is actually a bit more to the search for the underlying nature of reality than just ‘figuring stuff out’.  Theologian Gerd Theissen writes:

“Religion is a cultural sign language which promises a gain in life by corresponding to an ultimate reality.  The definition leaves open whether and in what sense there is an ultimate reality.  In religion, a gain in life is often to be understood in a very tangible way, above all as health and help … But often religions promise something more sublime in addition: a life in truth and love, a gain of identity in the crises and changes of life – even the promise of eternal life.  … Cognitively, religions have always offered a comprehensive interpretation of the world: they assign human beings their place in the universe of things … Religion maintains belief in a hidden order of things – and it functions where our knowledge fails in cognitive crises (for example in the question of what lies beyond this world in which we live and what removes us from ourselves at death).” (Gerd Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion  (London: SCM Press, 1999).(Emphases, mine.)

What is of interest here is that it is implied that knowing or inferring something about ultimate reality can help an individual to live a better life in some sense and Christianity  most certainly promised this ‘gain in life’ at its inception.

But somehow, today, what was once seen to be a path to a better life has changed into a way of life that, to outsiders, seems delusional.  The problem lies, I think, in how Christians began very early on to misunderstand the message and then to distort it.  The main reason for the distortion of that message was the very thing that the message was intended to defeat: a totally materialist view of reality versus one that includes consciousness as something that can be non-material.  And in our day, scientific materialism reigns supreme.

In many ways, scientific materialism is the modern incarnation of one side of the old conflict between the flesh and the Spirit, to use the apostle Paul’s terms, only taken to new extremes. Often not explicitly formulated or even acknowledged, this belief system is based on the idea that the material world is all there is, and everything else – consciousness in particular – is derived from it, a mere side effect. What’s more, it is often assumed that the physical world is causally closed, which implies that our free will is just an illusion. But for this belief system to make any sense, if only superficially, its proponents need their own creation myth to explain the complexity of human life, experience and consciousness: enter Darwinism. A random material universe, so the story goes, is somehow capable to produce life by chance; the complexity of our experience, including our so-called illusion of having free will, so the story continues, is just a product of selecting ‘advantageous’ traits over long time spans. Never mind that if the physical universe is causally closed and we have no free will, then our consciousness is entirely useless and certainly not advantageous for survival.[1] But if we have free will, that is, if our minds can somehow break the causal chains of the strictly physical world, then there must be something seriously wrong with materialist doctrine.[2]

But the materialists are determined to hold the line against any single acknowledgment of any process that is not totally random, accidental, and material. Evolution is their gospel, Darwin their savior.  Their story is that the Big Bang was the explosion of a primal atom, and all matter in the Universe was in this incredibly dense atom.  Everything that has happened since is just the result of random jostling of particles that, over billions of years, may form affinities by accident, and different forms of matter arise.  Eventually, some of this matter jostles against some other bit of matter, some sort of electrical (or other) interaction takes place, and that is 'life.’

But make no mistake about it!  The Big Bang theory is Creationism. Materialists believe that matter sprang suddenly into existence with nothing prior. That primal atom was there, and they make no attempt to explain it.  That's exactly the same as saying 'God was just there' and decided to create the universe.  Archeologist Steven Mithen writes:

Creationists believe that the mind sprang suddenly into existence fully formed. In their view it is a product of divine creation. They are wrong: the mind has a long evolutionary history and can be explained without recourse to supernatural powers.[3]

As you can see, Mithen is arguing from as false a premise as the 'God-did-it-in-six-days' gang. He has already made a big leap of assumption that when anyone speaks about 'mind' they are speaking exclusively about a mind that is tied to a physical body.  It apparently never occurs to him that pure consciousness is what is meant by ‘mind’ and not masses of neurons talking to each other with chemical and electrical signal systems. The very idea that consciousness might exist prior to matter is anathema to the materialists, yet that very idea in its most basic form is being discussed in recent years as the foundation of all existence in the form of pure information. At the same time, a close study of the matter reveals that many scientists involved in biochemical research have actually gutted classical Darwinism and some of them are coming forward and saying so plainly.[4] 

Proponents of Darwinism or neo-Darwinism insist that there are clear distinctions between science and religion.  Indeed, there are obvious differences in the style and content of a laboratory experiment and a claim to divinely revealed knowledge.  Materialists say that science is concerned with knowledge of the proven and visible, while religion is concerned with mindless faith in the unprovable and invisible.  And yet, when the facts are known, one must ask: is natural selection really a proven system based on demonstrated knowledge, or is it an unproven hypothesis in which there are so many contraindications that belief in it is also, in the final analysis, only a matter of faith?  Natural selection is no more visible than a Deity and, frankly, less likely to do what is claimed than supernatural intervention!

Evolutionists are often found taunting those who think that something higher is involved in our existence – that their miracles of special creation can, by definition, be neither proved nor disproved.  Yet the evolutionists arrive at similar propositions, especially when they exclude any possibility of something that guides and propels evolutionary processes.  The main difference between the believers in miracles of special creation and believers in accidental variations is that the former has God Almighty pulling the strings and the latter has only impossible probabilities of jostling atoms and molecules as its ultimate reality.  Not much difference, eh?

The late Weston La Barre, professor of anthropology at Duke University, was consumed with ideological fervor against the 'enemy' and wrote that all religions other than evolution are maladaptive retreats from reality.  When considering the Platonic philosophy which holds that ideas, forms, patterns, types and archetypes have an existence and reality of their own and would, therefore, seem to have an obvious relevance to evolution and the origins of species, he regularly compared Plato to Adolf Hitler.  He neglected to mention that Hitler was a confirmed – even extreme – Darwinist, believing that man evolved from monkeys, a proposition that Plato would have considered absurd.

The writings of many great researchers, including physicists and mathematicians, suggest that Plato was correct and that there are immaterial realities independent of physical brains, and more.  The evidence for this is actually more considerable than the rags and tatters of evidence glued together to attempt to validate macroevolution.  And, of course, this means that the advocates of materialistic Darwinism are the ones who are laboring under one of history's greatest delusions.

Quantum physics indicates that not only does 'matter' seem to dissolve into patterned vibrations at the most fundamental levels, it has become apparent that there is a structuring role played by consciousness, by information.[5]

There is now much accumulated evidence that mind does exist separate from the physical brain and that phenomena such as telepathy, psychokinesis, and other so-called paranormal effects are not only demonstrable, they conform to models of the universe with non-local causes.  In the fields of mathematics and physics, the world has changed under the material evolutionist's feet and there is much more to our reality than the naive realism upon which neo-Darwinism is based.  The fact that most contemporary evolutionists still cling to the old-fashioned, crude and mechanical theories in spite of the well-known developments in other scientific fields is more proof of the religious character of their beliefs.

And here we come to an interesting idea: the difficulty for both believers in purely mechanistic evolution and the creationists is that any cosmology that is sufficiently explanatory of the phenomena we observe in our universe has deeper dynamics and implications.  The evolutionists and creationists both seem incapable of the truly abstract, subtle thinking required to parse these implications. It is as though both types are confined within a set of cognitive restrictions that drive their perceptions, experiences and priorities.

Science took a serious wrong turn in the middle of the nineteenth century, about the time Darwin published his Origin of Species and that is why we do, indeed, live in a spiritual Dark Age as a consequence.  It wasn't that natural selection was wrong, per se, but the way the principles have been applied has been disastrous.  Natural selection was seized upon as the one and only underlying law of our reality – and this seizing was done by individuals with a very particular psychological make-up.  The same kinds of people that become fanatically religious and kill others in the name of their god can – and often do – become adherents of the religion of science.  Psychologist Robert Altemeyer calls them ‘rightwing authoritarians’ and ‘authoritarian followers,’[6] but there are leftwing authoritarians too – labeled ‘political-correctness authoritarians’ in the contemporary literature.

In the nineteenth century, certain discoveries that enhanced technology led to economic and political considerations, and that is when science took the wrong turn because the authoritarian type of individual also has other character traits that include a need to dominate others, as well as a strong tendency to greed.  The pursuit of science thus was taken over by politics, and an army of scientific workers was sought to serve the agendas of what has become known as the military-industrial complex.

Altemeyer points out that the authoritarian follower is quite capable of holding entirely contradictory beliefs, and this is how they are easily controlled by those in positions of power who desire that science serve only their interests.  Over and over again it is seen – in retrospect, of course – that irrational beliefs which are promulgated by authorities who desire to maintain control, and which are believed by the followers who want to be 'good,’ trump true science; and here I mean the mode of scientific cognition, not just 'science' since the so-called Enlightenment.

Over and over again, throughout history, going back even to ancient times, you can note that there were a number of really intelligent free thinkers who made observations, drew useful inferences from those observations, and suggested solutions that were ignored, ridiculed, reviled, buried; and often, the thinker who dared to voice his ideas was destroyed by one means or another because authoritarian followers are also aggressive against anything that is not pronounced to be 'okay' by their leaders.  Most often this destruction was – and is even today – due to power considerations: the individual has an idea that, in some way, threatens the political/social power structure.

The fact is, if you read enough history, you will discover that in war, killing or otherwise neutralizing the intelligentsia first is the aim of all invaders and conquerors because it is through the elimination or suppression of competent thinkers that any oppressive regime takes hold.  This has been done so regularly and extensively throughout history that it staggers the mind to consider it.  What it means, essentially, is that over and over and over again, pathological authoritarians have systematically eliminated from the human population the best and brightest minds, removing their DNA from the human gene pool, and it is ALL of humanity that is suffering the consequences of this loss.  It could very well be that this single strategy is the reason that humanity may indeed be on the verge of extinction right now, as is proposed by a number of eminent thinkers.

The Malthusian Darwinists, of course, will say that it is just 'survival of the fittest.’ I guess that depends on what you understand the 'fittest' to be.  In the animal kingdom, where fitness is measured by strength and power, the ability to wallop the heck out of all rivals to your possession of food and sexual partners, selection of this type might be useful.  But in the human species, where fitness and progress and even survival depend on brain power, killing off all the brainiest people in any given culture can only lead to degradation and devolution of the species as a whole.  And when that species holds in its hands the ability to destroy all life on the planet, well, I think you can see where that kind of selection will lead: a lot of power and not enough brains to know that it ought never to be used.

I would like to invite you to stop and try to imagine what life on Earth might be like if science had actually fulfilled its mandate of explaining our reality, solving the problems of humanity, and teaching us how to best interact with our world and each other.  If science was – today – actually a free exploration of nature and drawing accurate conclusions, creating theories, testing those theories with no hidden agendas, what might it have accomplished up to now?  Can you do it?  Can you think of any area of life that could not be improved by having a truly scientific understanding and clearly described response that was supported and implemented by the social/power structure to the benefit of all of humanity, not just the enrichment of a few?

Oh, you think it has been done?  Think again.  Read the history of science and human social development.  When you see how repeatedly the few individuals who had the right idea were marginalized and/or destroyed, if you have any firing neurons after being born into a humanity which has been genetically manipulated to lower intelligence, you will immediately realize that the same conditions – only worse – prevail today: what the mainstream follows is almost always what is politically expedient to those in power, with only enough truth involved to patch over the obvious tears in the now disintegrating fabric of the mask of science.

If a true, free, intelligent science, supported and encouraged by all of society, had actually been the norm since its inception, not the exception, we would live in a world where our very existence was not a shame to the planet that gave us birth.  We would have free, clean energy.  We would not have vast numbers of human beings living in poverty or starving.  We would have no over-population problems.  Health issues that dominate Western society and are bringing it to its knees would not be a problem because there would be plenty of nourishing food for all.  There would be no wars because scientific anthropology and social psychology would have figured out what is the best of all possible forms of social structure that allows for the widest expression of human types to flourish in harmony.  Children would not be medicated at ever younger ages because cognitive science would have established the best way to rear and educate them, and couples would be able to attend classes on infant care and parenting that were actually effective.  The best forms of education would be known so that the widest variety of options would be available to the varied human types and levels of intelligence and skill so that each individual would progress into a life of satisfaction doing what they really enjoy and are best at doing, and society would benefit by not wasting its most precious resource: human beings.  Consciousness – and non-material spirit – would be understood and the proper reverence for Nature and the Cosmos would be a natural part of the lives of all, and the well-known religious feelings in human beings would be directed toward compassion and empathy, not used by manipulative leaders to incite anger, aggression and death.  Free will, rather than being outright denied in science and philosophy as well as in very real terms politically, would be respected as the sacred principle that it is. In short, humankind would know how to live in harmony not only with each other, but with the world in which they are born.

All of these COULD be the conditions of a world where true science is a valued part of society. It could have been our world.

But that isn't what we have today.  What we have today is the chaos produced by pathological individuals that induces consent from the authoritarian followers.  As I noted above, science took a wrong turn when it was co-opted by power and diverted to the purposes of imperialism and materialistic greed.

The really sad thing is that the authoritarian followers who 'believe in authority' could as easily follow an authority that actually does have their best interests at heart, were such an authority to exist.  I don't think it does anymore: the psychopaths[7] have seen to that, co-opting and corrupting even science, to the core.  As it is, the authoritarian sheep follow and support the very worst of humanity: pathological individuals who gain power by deception and manipulation.  And in the end, as psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski wrote: “Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.”[8]

The moment that Darwin published his Origin of Species in the nineteenth century, an event that marked the culmination of a gradual shift in society from being dominated by religion to what was called 'rational thinking' and science, the authoritarians knew they had their theory of everything: random processes of matter, no consciousness needed.

So, it has been the steady application of materialistic evolutionary thinking that is behind the explanation of the order of the universe that prevails today, which underpins the chaos and disorder we see in a world devoid of information and organization.  There are, undoubtedly, psychopaths in the woodpile here acting as the éminence grise behind science – the thing that controls most of our social constructs and institutions – because we certainly can't say that all scientists, or even most of them, are psychopathic.  The profession itself excludes most psychopaths by virtue of the requirement for superior intellect.  However, it can certainly include a great many members that are authoritarian in personality type and who are under the control of pathological types.  We have seen living examples of this as a result of the COVID scam. 

Looking back at the history – more particularly, the archaeology – we notice how much like the Roman Empire our present civilization actually is.  The Romans were certainly rational and scientific in many respects.  They had factories which produced tableware that has been found at the farthest reaches of the Empire, even in peasant homes.  They had factories that manufactured roof tiles that covered the heads of even the poorest workers and their livestock.  A cache of letters was found in northern Britain where soldiers wrote home to have socks sent to them, which were, apparently, mass produced.  The Roman army was superior because it had standardized equipment, produced in mass quantities at factories located in hubs of the Empire.  Grain, olives, oil, foodstuffs of all kinds, luxury goods, were mass-produced and distributed throughout the Roman world.  Literacy was obviously very widespread, even to the working classes.  There were roads, sanitation systems, haute cuisine; in short, everything that we take for granted as essential to civilization.  The only difference seems to be that we have harnessed sources of power that the Romans did not have, which enables our civilization to aspire to globalization. But in almost every other way, we are exactly like them.  It is only science that has made us bigger and badder, so to say.  And, as the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  That fall may be the extinction of the human race.

The end of the Roman Empire witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever, substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.[9] 

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, in the next post, we'll come back to Davies and proceed with examining 'The Goldilocks Enigma'.  

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[1] Karl Popper argues this point in some depth; see Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (Routledge, 1984).

[2] For a thorough philosophical refutation of materialism in general, see for example Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012); David Ray Griffin, God Exists But Gawd Does Not: From Evil to New Atheism to Fine-Tuning (Process Century Press, 2016); Bernardo Kastrup, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (Iff Books, 2019); Rupert Sheldrake, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery (Deepak Chopra, 2013).

[3] Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames & Hudson, 1999).

[4] See, for example, Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (2^nd ed., Free Press, 2006), The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (Free Press, 2008) and Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution (HarperOne, 2019); David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin (Discovery Institute, 2010); Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2009) and Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2013); Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design (Discovery Institute, 2018); and the references in footnote 10 above.

[5] Florin Gaiseanu, Informational Model of Consciousness: From Philosophic Concepts to an Information Science of Consciousness (Philosophy Study, April 2019, Vol. 9, No. 4, 181-196 )

[6] Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (Cherry Hill Publishing, 2008).

[7] For a discussion on how pathological characters, including psychopaths as an extreme case, can subvert society and power structures, see Andrew Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes (Red Pill Press, 2006).

[8] Lobaczewski (2006).

[9] Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 183.