Philosophy – Joshualetter

What About Laplace’s Protoplanetary Disc?

Today I was thinking about one of the arguments for naturalism (atheism) that I discussed in a recent oral presentation.

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) was a French scholar who contributed to the eclipse of theistic science in the 19^th Century by observing that the origin of the solar system could be explained mechanically. Under the force of gravity, a “proto-planetary disc” formed, and as it collapsed and became denser and denser, it clumped together, forming a system of star and planets.

My only comment at that time was that that was all very fine, but where did Laplace suppose the gravity came from?

And that, of course, remains a perfectly good critique; but today it dawned on me that there is a lot more that can be said. Readers of this blog know about stellar nucleosynthesis, whereby the elements of the periodic table (oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, chromium, etc., etc.) are by-products of the fusion reactions still taking place in the stars. When the stars reach the end of their life cycle, they collapse and explode, spreading these elements into space, where they become the material for another generation of stars, which continue the process. Eventually all 90 naturally-occurring elements are formed and spread abroad in space. It was those materials which formed Laplace’s proto-planetary disc, which became our sun and our home, the Earth.

They also became our food source.

What is even more wonderful is that as that magnificent cosmic process produced our planet, it at the same time assembled all the elements we need for all our bodily functions; and we take those nutrients into ourselves whenever we consume plants grown in the soil or the animals that consume them.

Now, while the majority of our bodies are made up of common elements like oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, some “exotic” elements are present in trace amounts: silicon, fluoride, iron, zinc, copper, lithium, manganese, iodine, cobalt, chromium, selenium, and molybdenum. In large proportions many of these elements would be extremely toxic to us, but are required in very small quantities for proper bodily function. And that is what we have: lots of carbon for our muscles and bones, and trace amounts of copper, zinc, selenium, and iron, essential for healthy hearts. Why did stellar nucleosynthesis produce all the elements in exactly the right proportions that we needed in order to thrive?

And there is more! Our planet has a surfeit of iron and uranium, much more than is typical of most planets. And it’s a good thing, too, as it is the molten iron core of our planet which produces the magnetic field which surrounds the Earth and deflects the solar wind which otherwise would strip away our atmosphere, and it is the uranium whose decay produces the heat that keeps that iron core molten so that it can circulate and produce that magnetic shield!

Glory to God!

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Five: Twentieth Century Physics and the Recovery of Theistic Science

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

– Genesis 1:1

The author of the Book of Genesis was very clear about it: there was an absolute beginning. But Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) didn’t get the news. He taught that the universe was eternal, and that view prevailed in Europe until the early 20^th Century. What happened then is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science, and one of the most important. What is most significant about the story for our immediate purposes, is that it demonstrates that science and religion are allies in the search for truth, and not adversaries.

In 1915 Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), by which he explained gravity as a distortion in the fabric of space-time under the influence of massive objects. How this happens is beyond the scope of this paper (which is fortunate, seeing that it is beyond my comprehension too). What concerns us is that Einstein’s GTR mathematical equations implied that the universe is not static (and hence not eternal), but is either expanding or contracting. Einstein himself found that idea repugnant, and he eliminated it by introducing a “fudge factor,” or rather a “cosmological constant” into his equations.

In 1922 Alexander Friedmann showed that Einstein’s original equations were correct, and Einstein acknowledged the fudge factor to be his “biggest blunder.” Then in 1929 Edwin Hubble produced the first empirical confirmation of GTR by observing that the distant galaxies are moving away from us; indeed, he saw that the farther away the galaxies are, the faster they are receding. Thus Hubble showed that as between a contracting or an expanding universe, we definitely occupy an expanding one.

Then in 1931 Georges Lemaitre showed that by extrapolating the expansion of the universe backward in time, it could be shown that the universe began from a “singularity” in which all the material of the universe was concentrated into an infinitely dense and hot, infinitesimal mathematical point, strongly suggesting an absolute beginning.

Not everyone was convinced; and it was not until 1965 that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the radiation (the “cosmic microwave background radiation,” or CMBR) that was left over from the creation event, confirming Big Bang theory. For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

The fact that many scientists did not immediately embrace what has become known as “Big Bang” cosmology illustrates beautifully the unavoidable interrelatedness of science and religion. An absolute beginning has obvious theistic implications. Since the universe began to exist, it must have had a cause.¹ The cause must have been spaceless, timeless, and inconceivably powerful and intelligent. This would not necessarily be a personal God, but it does indicate a Creator of some kind. Many scientists were slow to acknowledge this. William Lane Craig states that the history of twentieth-century theory is a long series of failed attempts to falsify Big Bang cosmology:

With each successive failure of alternative . . . theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated. It can be confidently said that no cosmogonic model has been as repeatedly verified in its predictions and as corroborated by attempts at its falsification . . . as the Standard Big Bang Model.

Moreover, leading theorists have pronounced the matter closed. Craig puts it this way:

A watershed of sorts appears to have been reached in 2003 with Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin’s formulation of their theorem establishing that any universe which has on average over its past history been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have a spacetime boundary. . . . [T]he Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem . . . single-handedly sweeps away the most important attempts to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe, especially the darling of current cosmologists, the eternal inflationary multiverse. Vilenkin pulls no punches: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”²

Why, then, has a segment of the scientific community struggled so mightily to avoid the beginning? It seems sufficiently apparent that they are bringing their prior metaphysical (i.e., religious) commitments to bear upon their science, which confirms again the interrelatedness of science and religion.

Atheism is as much a religious viewpoint as is theism. Both address the perennial religious questions: Who am I, Where did I come from, Where am I going, Why are people so selfish, and What can we do about it? It is the questions themselves which qualify a viewpoint as religious.³

It is impossible to separate completely science and religion from each other. What matters is that when we practice science, we do it well, and when we practice religion, we do it well. That entails avoidance of doing religion and calling it science.

The Fine-Tuning of the Laws of Physics

The Twentieth Century produced two more blockbuster scientific discoveries that re-establish the plausibility of theism and of theistic science: the discovery that the laws of physics have been “fine-tuned” to an astonishing degree so as to produce a universe hospitable to life; and the elucidation of the DNA molecule.

In 1961 Robert H. Dicke discovered that gravity and electromagnetism must be fine-tuned for life – that is, that they have very precise values, and that if they did not have exactly those very values, there would be no life anywhere in the universe. Hawking has stated, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”⁴ In the ensuing decades, scientists have learned that almost everything about the physical cosmos is fine-tuned.⁵Suffice it to say, anyone who is not flabbergasted at the astonishing fine-tuning of the cosmos, is not paying attention.

DNA

In addition to the Big Bang and the Fine-Tuning, Twentieth Century science has made one more discovery having sweeping implications, and that is the discovery of the mind-boggling complexity of living things.

The human body has roughly 30 trillion cells and twenty thousand different kinds of proteins. Proteins carry out all of the life functions of the organism, from respiration to metabolism to digestion to the immune system, to name a few. Proteins also build and maintain the system in which the instructions for fabricating all of these proteins are contained in the three billion base pairs of DNA, not to mention the system for communicating those instructions to the ribosomes, where all the proteins that the body needs are manufactured. The complexity is overwhelming. One way to gain a deep appreciation of this would be to read Fazale Rana’s Fit For a Purpose.⁶ The impression of design is unavoidable. Rana shows that cellular functions take place at the atomic and the subatomic levels, one proton at a time, one electron at a time, performing precisely their instructions from DNA.

Conclusion

It makes my head spin when I consider that until 1929 scientists believed that the universe was static and eternal. It spins faster when I recall that the Big Bang was presented to me in high school in 1965 as a commonplace fact, as if we had always known the universe had an absolute beginning.

Did I mention that until 1924 we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy? Do you remember when you first learned there are billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars? I don’t. People weren’t talking about it much when I was growing up. We’re still not talking about it.

Listen. If there was a beginning, then there is a Creator. If there is a Creator, naturalism is false. This is news! The whole project of investigating nature needs thoroughgoing reform.

But there is much more than that. There was a beginning, and there is a Creator. Who cares about naturalism? There is a Creator! Who is this person? Did he, as the Bible teaches, take human form, walk the planet, and promise me eternal life?

I know that He did.

Thomas Alderman

December 3, 2024

ENDNOTES

¹I have previously demonstrated this necessary causal relationship. See Part Four, fn 2.

²William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Crossway 2008), 139-140.

³I have also addressed this question in a previous post. See joshualetter.com June 13, 2015 blog post, “The Definition of Religion.”

⁴Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1 1998, 1996), 129-131.

⁵I have discussed this topic at length also. See joshualetter.com June 28, 2018 blog post, “The Existence of God: Four Philosophical Arguments,” pp 18-27 at https://joshualetter.com/2018/06/28/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com January 27, 2023 blog post, “The Heavens Declare the Glory” at https://joshualetter.com/category/philosophy/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com July 26, 2022 blog post, “Water: Designed for Life,” at https://joshualetter.com/?s=water.

And see reasons.org Design Compendium at https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009.

⁶Fazale Rana, Fit For a Purpose (Reasons to Believe Press, 2021). Rana is the Executive Director of Reasons to Believe.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Four: Whatever Happened to Theistic Science?

The 1633 trial of Galileo occurred right in the middle of the Thirty Years religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. The causes of the wars were complex, but they started when Ferdinand II, the future Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Protestant Bohemia. The wars then proceeded with complex and shifting sets of alliances. Eventually, Europe was exhausted after decades of sectarian conflict, and was receptive to new ways of ordering relations among the state, the church, and religious minorities. Partly in reaction against efforts to impose religious orthodoxy by the use of force, there arose in the 17^th and 18^th centuries an intellectual movement which became known, somewhat ironically, as “the Age of Enlightenment.” The intellectuals of that era thought they could end such strife by finding a source of moral authority independent of the Bible, and they thought they had found it in the power of human reason.

Human reason did not prove equal to the task. Scholars were enticed into a number of intellectual blunders which set the stage for the embrace of Darwinism and the eventual outright rejection of the former synthesis based on the biblical doctrine of Creation, wherein a rational God had created man a rational being in God’s own image, capable of comprehending an ordered cosmos.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

Naturalism is the view that nature is all that exists. That is, the matter and energy which constitute the physical world exist, but nothing else does. The immediate corollaries of this view, of course, are that the cosmos and everything in it is a single interconnected system of physical causation, and that spirits do not exist, and that includes God.

It may still safely be said, perhaps, that most contemporary scientists are naturalists – although that is changing, since naturalism has been under siege for decades and is showing signs of strain. Certainly most scientists in the fields of paleontology and biology are naturalists. This is in stark contrast to those in the fields of physics and astronomy, many of whom have exclaimed the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics. The difference is attributable, no doubt, to the fact that astronomers and physicists are not as constrained as biologists are by the dictates of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.

Here is a representative sample of the views of many astronomers and physicists:

Albert Einstein (1879–1955):

In response to the evidence for the Big Bang, he acknowledged “the necessity for a beginning”¹ and “the presence of a superior reasoning power.”².

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018):

Commenting on the Fine-Tuning of the Universe, he stated that “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”³.

Cambridge astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) (who never accepted Big Bang cosmology):

A “superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology. . . .”⁴.

Physicist Paul Davies (1946- ):

He once promoted atheism⁵ and is still opposed to Intelligent Design theory,⁶ but has conceded that “the laws [of physics] . . . seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.”⁷ He further states: “[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.”⁸

Design is an activity of mind. Mind is a capacity of persons. The Creator is a person (or rather, three persons). Science is the study of the Creation. All truth is God’s truth.

Clearly, then, a commitment to naturalism is unnecessary for the conduct of good science. But we want to claim much more than that: we want to claim that naturalism actually impedes the progress of science.

Naturalism posits that human consciousness arises out of purely impersonal, mechanistic processes. Somehow (they don’t tell us how, since they don’t know how), it is said, the motions of the atoms in my brain produce the thoughts, beliefs, and intentions which form my mental experience. But thoughts, beliefs, and intentions are mental events, not physical events. Mental events occur only in minds. A mind is not a physical thing.

The naturalist will interject that mental events are embodied in neuro-physiological structures. That may be the case; yet the properties of brain events and the properties of mental events are mutually exclusive. The properties of brain events are physical: magnitude, valence, location, connections among neurons. Mental events have none of those physical properties and possess one property which brain events lack, namely, “aboutness.” Mental events – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – are always about something else.

Thus the mind and the brain, having entirely disparate sets of properties, cannot be the same thing.

A careful distinction must here be made. Naturalism and evolution are not the same thing; yet they are almost always conflated. The reason is readily apparent. Consciousness is something that requires an explanation, and evolution is the only naturalistic explanation for the rise of consciousness which anyone has ever proposed. If you are a naturalist, therefore, your choice is between evolution, as thinly supported by evidence as it is, and no explanation at all. It is thus naturalism, not evidence, which drives naturalists into Darwin’s embrace.

We saw that theism provides an intelligible justification for our confidence in the reliability of the human cognitive capability: our having been created in the image of a rational deity. What is naturalism’s justification? Far from positing a rational source for the human mind, naturalism posits a cognitive faculty formed by undirected, purposeless, mechanistic, impersonal processes. What basis is there for confidence that such processes could result in the formation of a reliable mind?

J. B. S. Haldane, a leading evolutionary theorist of the mid-twentieth century, may have been the first to notice that

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.

And no reason to believe that my awareness evolved. Darwin himself worried about this.

There is more. According to naturalism, theism is false; yet belief in God is widespread. According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of the world’s population are religiously affiliated. But theism is false, according to neo-Darwinists. Do false beliefs then have survival value? If not, how can evolutionary theory account for our species’ religiosity, how can we trust our cognitive capacity, and how can we be sure that naturalism is true? Naturalism is thus seen to be not only self-refuting, but an obstacle to the progress of science.⁹

NEXT WEEK: Part Four: What Happened to Theistic Science?

ENDNOTES

¹A. Vibert Douglas, “Forty Minutes with Einstein,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 50 (1956), 100.

²Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948), 106.

³Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1998, 1996), 129-131.

⁴Hoyle, “The Universe,” 16.

⁵Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), viii, 3–42, 142–143.

⁶https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/ spaceexploration.comment. (Page unavailable 12.2.24.)

⁷Paul Davies, Superforce (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 243.

⁸Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 203; Paul Davies, “The Anthropic Principle,” Science Digest 191, no. 10 (October 1983), 24.

⁹I have Kenneth Samples of Reasons to Believe to thank for this argument.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Two: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

As we saw in Part One, there are reasons science arose in the West. At the same time there are also reasons why it did NOT arise anywhere else: their theology did not permit it.

Barbour argues that “science in its modern form [arose] in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”¹ These included, as noted in Part One, the belief in a rational God who created an orderly cosmos and humans in his image as also rational beings precisely because he wished to be known.

Greece.

Ancient Greek philosophy is a case in point. Many Greek philosophers “assumed they could deduce how nature ought to behave . . . based on only superficial observations of natural phenomena or without actually observing nature at all.”². Thus, Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was based more on his suppositions about the divinity of the celestial objects and his assumptions about what kinds of motions would be suitable to them, given their divine nature. Supposing that a circular motion was most perfect, for example, Aristotle concluded that the orbit of the sun around the Earth must be perfectly circular. (Of course the sun does not orbit the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit of the sun is elliptical, not circular.) He also reasoned that the Earth must be eternal and the center of the universe.

Egypt

Despite Egypt’s technical prowess in building the pyramids, Egyptian mathematics and geometry remained a practical art.

Any possibility for scientific breakthroughs was destroyed by

the polytheistic, animistic precepts central to Egyptian religion. In polytheism, each god governs its domain according to its own rules; uniformity and hence intelligibility are elusive. In animism, likewise, many gods inhabit natural things such as trees and animals.

Eastern pantheistic monism

The Hindu and Buddhist precept that all is One implies that all distinctions are illusory – a real curiosity-killer! The study of nature requires duality: the knower and the thing which is known. They are not the same thing. Just as importantly, classification is an indispensable scientific exercise. E.g., a dolphin is not a porpoise, and a bacterium is not a virus. Study of the Creation entails careful distinctions. But in Eastern thought, to realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond knowledge. This is hardly a view that encourages scientific inquiry.

NEXT WEEK: Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

ENDNOTES

¹Barbour, Religion and Science, 27.

²Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 32.