Note: Alan, you’re ahead of me. I’ll get there, I promise.

I know, here comes the Apologists out of the woodworks. I guess I am bringing it on myself.

There is generally some excitement from friends I know that one apologist or another is having a debate with some Smart Evil Atheist. We hope for something like this exchange based on an urban legend that Albert Einstein delivered these arguments to a professor. It seems so slam-dunk and the end of the story is the conversion of the evil professor.

I haven’t ever witnessed such a thing.

Most theological debates I see start with each person presenting their side, then each person redefines certain key words used by their opponents, then repeat themselves until the time is up. Folks vote on ‘who won’. Usually the Christian debater claims some sort of victory and the SEA goes back to teaching at a university somewhere.

If debate truly did anything, I would be a hindu today. Swami Vivekananda addresses the World Councils of Religion in the 1890s and basically lays down the argument that Christianity and Islam gain prosperity by subjugation and war. By the end of the council in Chicago, he was receiving three minute standing ovations. (Yeah, I listen to Ravi Zacharias sometimes.)

Back to the point, though. Some friends of mine are excited about an upcoming seminar featuring a debate and talks on Intelligent Design. My friends think it is quite odd that I do not agree with many of their arguments pointing to ID. I’ve been called anti-Christian because I point out logical issues with their presentation. It usually ends with the question, If you don’t believe in ID, why do you believe at all?

That comes later, first, why I wrote this in the first place. Here are two statements I believe are true:

* The anthropic principle does not prove the existence of God.
* ID is based more in passion than in reason.

First, the anthropic principle which states that the fundamental constants of the universe have set values they have because this is what is required for advanced forms of life. The line of reasoning then moves into the finely tuned universe and other neat vocabulary terms. Ultimately, though, it comes down to the belief that the odds of the universe existing this way without a creator is so astronomically low that it is laughable to conceive.

What I point out to my friends is that this is the prosecutor’s fallacy. Basically, the statement that the odds are almost impossible that the universe arrived at its present state by natural selection is meaningless. The only way that this statement has meaning is if we know the odds that the universe exists this way because of a creator. You may believe that the odds are 1:1 that God is the reason that certain universal constants are what they are, but you are trying to prove that by saying that the alternative is extremely unlikely. The odds of both have to be established independently before making comparisons.

Suppose a family has two children die upon reaching the age of 10 weeks old. What are the odds that both deaths are due to SIDS? You could say that one in 8.5 million that a child would die from SIDS at 10 weeks. I could say that the odds that both dying this way are on in 72.25 million. Surely, something sinister is afoot right? Well, I could also say that only one murder in 10 million is of an infant child. That would makes the odds of murder one in 100 million. Does it support SIDS as the cause because it is most likely? Does it point to a middle option?

No, the odds of either one happening are extremely low, but one of them happened. The solution is that evidence presented must be weighed against the fact that both events are extremely unlikely. In other words, I shouldn’t have an idea of innocence or guilt based on the odds. (See Sally Clark case)

A good illustration of this that is less grisly than the Sally Ride case is this. Suppose you have 1000 balls in a really large bowl. Some are wooden and some are plastic. We know that all the wooden balls are white. We know that 10% of the plastic balls are white, the other plastic balls are red. Given those facts, I pull out a white ball – what are the odds that it is made of wood?

First time I read this illustration, I said 90%. I said that to myself because I figure that 90% of all the white balls are wooden. The problem is I do not know how many wooden balls are in the bowl. I could have 10 wood balls and 990 plastic ones. That would mean that the entire bowl has 109 white balls of which 10 are made of wood. That means most of the white balls are actually made of plastic!

Ok, so you don’t like the anthropic principle. Now what?
When I think of ID, I actually like the idea of irreducible complexity. Unfortunately, it is less defensible than the anthropic principle. How did the eye evolve? Even Darwin wondered at this. Yet, not knowing how it evolved is not equal to it cannot have evolved. A person cannot present an argument based on ignorance.

Is science, therefore evil? I tend to agree with St. Augustine (I think, trying to find the quote) that a Christian should learn as much about the universe as possible in order to learn about God. I believe that we have been given the tools to examine the universe and we create more sophisticated tools as time goes on. I also believe that preconceived notions are more evil than fine sounding arguments. When mankind discovered that the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun, there should have been no religious reaction. Yet, men were made to confess errors in their science and declared heretics if they did not. I feel that in many ways, ID and other attempts to put God in a box sets up the Christian and non-Christian alike to be denounced as heretics on matters in which the Bible is silent.

I can read Isaiah 40:22 and believe that God inspired Isaiah to write that the earth was round when the rest of the world believed the world was flat. Then again, the world can be round and flat at the same time. Besides, focusing on the shape of the earth removes the point of the series of chapters (40-42) that speak of the coming messiah. Did the Hebrew reader in Isaiah’s time really think to himself that now he knows the earth is round? When I speak of the silence of the Bible, I’m talking about things like the dinosaurs, and exactly how God formed DNA, and other stuff like that. The Bible doesn’t speak about the process of building proteins, nor does it address photosynthesis in plants. But both are marvelous things. I believe in a creator, and thus I regard them as remarkable creations.

Again, I believe in God. I believe he created the universe. I do not look out at the world and see mathematical equations scrolling down a la The Matrix. I see the wonder of a cloud, shaped by the wind. I wonder at the veins in a leaf. I marvel at the stars and the unattainable idea of the sheer size of it all. I marvel that the so-called laws of the universe are very different on the quantum level. (I think it’s fun that we give quarks names like ‘strange’.)

What makes things difficult for thinkers is that our current understanding of God is based on a deterministic approach. In other words, if I can determine a foundational fact, the rest can be built atop this foundation until we have a solid understanding of God. Quantum mechanics presents an issue in that the universe is probabilistic. Because of the uncertainty principle, we can know a particle’s position or velocity, but not both. When the position of a particle is measured, it affects the velocity, which includes direction, of that particle and vice versa. As such, once we know a particle’s position, we no longer know for certain where it is going. Einstein hated this notion of fuzziness, so he challenged a colleague with an experiment in an effort to remove any idea of probability and fuzziness. Einstein found himself the loser of this challenge to which he replied, “God doesn’t play dice.” His colleague replied, “Don’t tell God what to do!”

We love to tell God what to do. If we can get him in a box, we can find ways to manipulate Him, or trap Him in His own words, or force God to ‘rule’ in our favor. In many ways, I see ID this way. We want the Earth to be young because Genesis can then be read literally. We want science to point to a creator, even if we have to invent the science, so that we can somehow justify our faith as something more than superstition. Hey, I’m guilty of this as well. You know how many times I have demanded God to heal my children, bless my wife, provide money, ‘fix’ the ICOC, ‘fix’ me, ‘fix’ ________ ? I tried to back God into a corner and make his do something because of a promise that I read into a passage. It’s easy for me to imagine that in trying to understand Him, that I put him in similar corners as well.

God has indeed done many of the things I have asked, but he is larger than my attempts to hem Him in. He has come through in ways that I never would have imagined. My faith is renewed, often times because He has done the opposite of what I asked. There’s a story about the kanji for change is danger + opportunity that fits here. That’s another column for another time.

Does a universe that appears random and probabilistic mean that God is not there? I’m sure it looks that way – it looks that way to me sometimes. In light of the anthropic principle and the uncertainty principle there are reasonable ideas that are still compatible with my faith. I want my faith to be reasonable, but not at the expense of creating a new branch of science to do so. God has to be big enough that I do not need to do his work for Him. It’s true that I have reason to believe because of what I read in the Bible. Ultimately, it is the source of my faith, after all faith comes from hearing the message (Romans 10:17). I did not come to faith because of empirical reasoning (though some do) or because I looked at the universe and sought to disprove Him (though some have tried). I came to faith because I believed what the Bible says. Any discussion of the nature of God is going to lead back to this point.

Now some I know may think that my trust of this book is silly. I can talk about the canonization and how the Bible came to be. I can even admit that it is easier to believe in some ways that the Quran or the Book of Mormon are easier to deal with because they each have only one author. Some are amazed at the textual consistency of the Bible. Some are amazed that the New Testament can be largely reconstructed from extrabiblical quotations, even if he had no text today. For others like me, though, all of this is just neat stuff to store away from a possible appearance on Jeopardy. I came to know God by putting his words into practice in my life. God addresses life, how to live, how to be , how to love, etc. All of these things deal with the world as I experience it, not the theoretical world as it may or may not be. Belief in God, for me, is made up, in part, of the practice of God. And the practice of God is not a cosmological issue.

But I do have an answer for folks that may bring up these scientific ideas as demonstrated the existence or lack of existence of God. It is reasonable enough and logical enough, even if not universally accepted. (What ideas are universally accepted?) As far as the anthropic principle, I believe in a multiverse made up of universes where the fundamental constants are all different from each other. Our universe has billions of observers, others may have none, more, or less observers. The condition for life as we know it have a very narrow threshold. I would guess that some of these universes contain life as we do not know it. Some probably do have life as we know it. The anthropic principle may not point to God, but my belief in God leads me to wonder at his great power. I am one person in a large universe amongst an infinite set of other universes. He cares about me.

When it comes to quantum mechanics and living in a probablistic universe, I again point to a multiverse model suggested by Hugh Everett. I can’t explain it any better than Wikipedia:

The Everett many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a “multiverse” composed of mostly independent parallel universes. This is not accomplished by introducing some new axiom to quantum mechanics, but on the contrary by removing the axiom of the collapse of the wave packet: All the possible consistent states of the measured system and the measuring apparatus (including the observer) are present in a real physical (not just formally mathematical, as in other interpretations) quantum superposition. (Such a superposition of consistent state combinations of different systems is called an entangled state.) While the multiverse is deterministic, we perceive non-deterministic behavior governed by probabilities, because we can observe only the universe, i.e. the consistent state contribution to the mentioned superposition, we inhabit. Everett’s interpretation is perfectly consistent with John Bell’s experiments and makes them intuitively understandable. However, according to the theory of quantum decoherence, the parallel universes will never be accessible for us, making them physically meaningless.

Wikipedia article on Quantum Mechanics

In English, we see things that look like they are uncertain. They really aren’t in the scope of existence, but our perspective is limited. One of the main reasons I believe this from a religious standpoint, is that it does allow us to understand God as certain, not uncertain. We see him an uncertain and random because His action don’t make sense to us. Just because we see him this way, does not make him this way.

It also leads me to see God as outside probability. Of course he knows what’s going to happen, he knows what every possible outcome looks like. More than that, when God, who is able to embrace all probabilities speaks to us, his voice cannot be limited like ours. He has total perspective. It would be good to listen to one with infinite perspective on things.

The cosmology of what I believe is reasonable, but not modern or widely believed. Still, my goal is not to have the right answer in these matters. My goal is to discover how what I know about God and what I know about science work together. Sometimes I change my view on God (my view is that He is much much bigger than I previously thought). Sometimes it changes my view on science (there are truly unknowable things and we can prove that they are unknowable.) Either way, it’s important to me to see God and His possibilities. Trying to put a box around him turns him into an idol that I can control and manipulate.

I know this is not so well formed. It’s an idea that was rattling around in my head until I wrote it down. Maybe I can work out the details later, there’s a few loose ends.