Modern Physics and Ancient Faith - Don’t Mess With the Strong Nuclear Force!

If you had been placing bets 150 years ago around what physics would have to say about the existence of God, you would have lost a lot of money.

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

By: Stephen M. Barr

Published: 2003

312 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

Barr takes all the discoveries of 20th-century physics, stuff like the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, the various forces, and argues that all of these things are more compatible with belief in God, specifically a traditional Judeo-Christian God, than with a belief in pure materialism.

This is illustrated most succinctly in the underlying values for various background constants of the universe. For most of these if they varied even slightly then life would be impossible. This is known as the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God, and Barr lays it out in rigorous detail.

What’s the author’s angle?

Barr is a scientist, and a believing Catholic. So he definitely has a dog in the fight, but he also does a good job of steelmanning the other side of the argument. Also it’s important to clarify what the fight is. It’s not a fight between religion and science. Barr is both a believer and a scientist. It’s a fight between religion and materialism. Which is a different animal. This is not to say he’s dogmatic (perhaps I shouldn’t keep using the word “fight”) the tone is very reasonable. He’s mostly targeting a lazy “modern science shows that God is silly and unnecessary” crowd.

Who should read this book?

This was one of the books mentioned by Ross Douthat in his book Believe (see my review of Douthat’s book here, or check out the PSmith’s far superior one here). And I was glad I followed Douthat’s recommendation, the book did not disappoint. If you’re at all interested in the fine-tuning argument or related ideas I think you’ll love this book. But I can clearly see where it’s too niche for the majority of people.

What does the book have to say about the future?

On some level I think it says everything about the future. It’s an argument that there is a teleology, that there is a plan. Beyond that this book, by rejecting materialism, leads naturally to an assumption of dualism. From there, though Barr doesn’t spend much time on it, all of this encourages a belief in something outside of this life, which is most commonly thought of as an afterlife.

From a more pragmatic stance, it does seem like, after a long flirtation with new atheism, that the broad, philosophical current of intellectual discourse is becoming increasingly skeptical of pure materialism. On the other hand it’s possible that I’ve just been reading far too much Bentham’s Bulldog.

Specific thoughts: Somehow whenever people try to prove we don’t need a God, they end up creating something very similar.

Barr covers a lot of territory, and with considerable depth. So for the moment I’m just going to focus on his discussion of the origin of life. He points out that evolution does an admirable job of explaining life in all of its variety once life actually exists, but it doesn’t really explain how life gets going in the first place. As Barr explains:

The origin-of-life problem is made very hard by the fact that that first, “primitive” life-form was probably already enormously complicated… biologists have given some thought to the minimum requirements for a self-reproducing one-celled organism. It appears that it needs to have quite an elaborate structure, involving dozens of different proteins, a genetic code containing at least 250 genes, and many tens of thousands of bits of information. For chemicals to combine in random ways in a “primordial soup” to produce a strand of DNA or RNA containing such a huge amount of genetic information would be as hard as for a monkey to accidentally type an epic poem.

In the spirit of covering the potential counter arguments, he lists three ways for something like this to happen:

• Natural selection, but we’ve already ruled this one out. There’s no life for selection to operate on.

• Law, as in the features of the universe make it inevitable. But, while the features of the universe make life possible (which is, in itself, very improbable), they don’t make it inevitable.

• Chance, as in the elaborate structure came together by a fortunate confluence of elements.

Barr allows that while it seems impossible for it to have come about through natural selection, or law, pure chance may be enough. That said, it’s hard to put into words how infinitesimal this chance is. It truly is similar to a monkey randomly typing Hamlet. And the chances of that happening are somewhere on the order of 1 in 10^200,000.

This would seem to also rule out chance, but there is some possibility that the universe is infinite, and if it is, then it doesn’t matter how small the chance is, it will happen. And this is essentially the argument of most materialists.¹

This presents a bind for the materialists which Barr states rather elegantly:

Are there an infinite number of planets? It is impossible for us to know by direct observation, because we cannot see what lies beyond our “horizon” of about 15 billion light-years. But it is interesting that in order to explain the origin of life from inanimate matter in a way that does not invoke divine intervention it may be necessary to postulate an unobservable infinity of planets…

We shall see in later chapters other cases where the materialist, in order to avoid drawing unpalatable conclusions from scientific discoveries, has to postulate unobservable infinities of things. How ironic that, having renounced belief in God because God is not material or observable by sense or instrument, the atheist may be driven to postulate not one but an infinitude of unobservables in the material world itself!

Obviously this is not some kind of checkmate. Numerous arguments could be lodged here, some better than others, but this is not the first time I have noted that atheists seem to be in a habit of offering up god-like structures whenever they really start to think deeply about things. (See my post Atheists and the Unavoidability of the Divine.)

Here at the end, I think I’ll pull back a bit. Obviously there is no irrefutable proof of God’s existence, and in fact as a Mormon, I’m not even coming to the discussion with the same fundamental assumptions as Barr, who is Catholic. But man, does this book give one a lot to chew-on.

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It’s always interesting to review something I find so compelling, only to find out that other people consider it to be complete balderdash. (Yeah, that’s right, balderdash!) Should you be in this latter category let me know. I’d be curious to know what, precisely, you object to. Of course it might be that you object to everything I write. But have you read everything I’ve written? Maybe you should do that first before you jump to conclusions!

1. I started and abandoned various tangents around Fermi’s Paradox, something Barr doesn’t really cover. The fact that we haven’t seen any life would indicate that it is indeed difficult to get started. The fact that it got started shortly after the Earth formed would seem to indicate the opposite.