I do not think it is fair to say that scientific naturalism ignores the subjective. While it is true that neuroscientists do not yet have an established material model of mind, they have considerable data on changes that occur in the brain during subjective mental activity. They have established beyond doubt that material processes are involved.

Nevertheless, Haught’s view seems to be the common refrain of theists arguing against a purely natural universe. In his book God Is No Delusion, Thomas Crean, a Dominican friar of the priory of St. Michael the Archangel in Cambridge, England, follows Haught in using the argument from ignorance fallacy, saying he cannot understand how thoughts could emerge from matter, and therefore they must have come from God. He asks, “How could a ‘material kind of thing’ cause an ‘immaterial kind of thing’ to exist?” Well, a computer is a material kind of thing that can solve mathematical and logical problems. It can write poetry that English professors are unable to distinguish from that written by humans. It can produce beautiful art and music. The aesthetic experiences of these products are immaterial “kinds of things,” but they result from physical brain activity.

Unaware of these facts, Crean continues in the same vein, “Materialism, then, is absurd. A thought cannot be a material thing, nor can it be caused by a material thing. The only possible conclusion is that thought as such is something independent of matter, that is, something spiritual.”

In their short book Naturalism, philosophers Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro attempt to show that naturalism is intellectually incoherent. The authors are theists who teach at Notre Dame University and St. Olaf College, respectively. They claim that a duality of the physical and the mental is necessary to explain mental causation, that is, how mental events cause physical events.

This strikes me as rather backward. If, as naturalism asserts, mental events arise from physical events in the brain, then there surely is no problem since we then have physical events causing physical events, just as when a cue ball hits an eight ball and causes it to go into a pocket. On the other hand, if mental events have their own nonphysical nature, then we have the problem of explaining how something nonphysical can cause physical events. Goetz and Taliaferro do not provide us with even a speculative model for how that can happen.

When theists such as Goetz and Taliaferro refer to gaps in the scientific record, the best they can do is say, “See, God must have done it.” This provides no more information and is less economical than the simple statement: “Nature did it.” But materialists can usually do much better than this simple assertion and give some idea of how nature did it. In a physical explanation we often have a theory, such as relativity or evolution, that provides detailed mechanisms for the events being observed. Even when we do not have an existing established theory, such as for the origin of life or mental processes, we have plausible proposals under consideration that agree with all existing knowledge and that require no supernatural elements. Theists can make only the simple assertion, “God did it.” Scientists can say, “We don’t know. But we’ll try to find out.”

Of course, mind-body dualism is a widespread “commonsense” belief among laypeople. Goetz and Taliaferro seem to think common sense is sufficient to adopt the dualist view.

Goetz and Taliaferro also claim to show the philosophical coherence of divine agency. So what if it is philosophically coherent? That says nothing about its reality. A fantasy computer game in which heroes come back to life after being killed is philosophically coherent; it wouldn’t run on a computer if it wasn’t logical. But the world is still not that way.

Philosopher Paul Churchland points out that throughout history people have expressed doubt that science will ever be able to explain some phenomena. The first-century astronomer Ptolemy (c. 85–165), the greatest astronomer of his age, said science would never be able to capture the true nature of heavenly causes because they were inaccessible. He didn’t have Newton’s inspiration that the laws of physics are universal, meaning they apply both on Earth and in the heavens. The nineteenth-century philosopher Comte (d. 1857) similarly argued that we could never know the physical constitution of stars. He didn’t know about atomic spectra. As late as the 1950s, most people were still expressing doubt that life could be explained purely materialistically and believed instead that some life force was needed. With the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA and the great success of the theory of evolution by natural selection, science saw no need for, and indeed no evidence for, a special force of life.

When the mental dualist asks, “How can thoughtless matter give rise to thought?” he is expressing the same argument from ignorance fallacy used by those who say, “How can dead matter give rise to life?”

Many questions remain unanswered by those who claim that some immaterial spirit or soul is ultimately controlling the actions of the brain. How does this immaterial thing that carries no energy or momentum provide energy and momentum to particles in the brain? This implies violations of conservation of energy and momentum, which the theist believes are God’s laws. Why is it okay to break these laws of God and not his other laws, such as his ban on homosexual marriage and using condoms?

Further Reading

• Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995).
• Thomas Crean, God is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2007).
• Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Erdman Publishing Company, 2008).
• John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).

This is adapted from Stenger’s latest book, The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (Prometheus Books 2009).

The suit contends that the collider could produce a tiny black hole or an exotic object called a “strangelet,” either of which might swallow up Earth and perhaps more.

By the time you read this, a hearing scheduled for June 16 may have settled the suit. In any case, let me give some background on what is an interesting scientific and moral question. The same issue was raised before the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was turned on at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island last year, which took place without consequence.

Let’s take a look at the processes involved. First, any black hole that might be formed in an LHC single collision will be tiny. Since the total energy of the two beams is E=14 trillion electron-volts, using m=E/c² we calculate the mass of the black hole to be 2.4 x 10^-23 kilograms, equivalent to the mass of about 15,000 hydrogen atoms. This is far less than the theoretical minimum mass of a black hole, the Planck mass, which is 2.2 x 10^-8 kilograms.

Nevertheless, suppose such a black hole is possible. Stephen Hawking has proven that a black hole is unstable with a mean lifetime that depends on the cube of its mass. While the mean lifetime of astronomical black holes is many times the age of the universe, the LHC black hole would survive only 2 x 10^-84 seconds before disintegrating into Hawking radiation. Needless to say, this is hardly enough time to swallow up Earth.

So, there should be no problem—unless Stephen Hawking and the rest of the physics community are wrong. No one has ever seen a black hole decay, so as the creationists like to say, this is “theory and not fact.”

Strange matter is more problematic. This is a hypothetical form of matter composed not only of the usual “up” (u) and “down” (d) quarks that compose the nuclei of familiar atomic matter, but also of strange (s) quarks. The proton is udu and the neutron is udd. The Lambda hyperon (Λ), which was first seen in cosmic rays in 1947, is uds, making it an example of “strange matter.” However, because the s quark is much heavier than the u and d, the Λ is unstable and only has a mean lifetime of 2.6 x 10^-10 seconds.

It has been conjectured that strange matter may become stable when a sufficient number of quarks are brought together. This could happen because the Pauli exclusion principle favors three distinguishable quarks over protons and neutrons, each of which has two identical quarks. Estimates I have seen indicate that thousands of quarks are needed for stability, but these calculations are highly uncertain.

Where would all these quarks come from? In a high-energy collision between nuclei, a quark-gluon plasma is formed, which at the LHC energy can contain thousands of quarks and massless gluons. This may then condense into strange matter.

A strangelet is a chunk of stable strange matter. The ominous scenario is that any negatively charged strangelet coming into contact with an ordinary nucleus might convert it to strange matter, setting up a chain reaction in which Earth would eventually become a hot lump of strange matter.

The best argument against the suggested catastrophe is that cosmic ray protons of much higher energies than will be produced by the LHC have been hitting Earth and every other object in the universe for thirteen billion years, and nothing to our knowledge has converted to strange matter, or even black holes. The cosmic ray with the highest observed energy has an output of about 10²⁰ electron-volts. Assuming it is a proton, the center-of-mass energy resulting from it colliding with another proton at rest, on the Moon for example, is 4.5 x 10¹⁴ electron-volts—higher than the LHC collision energy. They have not destroyed the moon or any objects that we know about.

If strangelets are being produced, we would expect all neutron stars in the universe to be strange stars, and we have observational reasons to think they are not. On the other hand, there are a few anomalous objects that are too dense to be neutron stars but not dense enough to be black holes. Perhaps these are strangelets.

Prominent physicists, including Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek, were charged by the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory to analyze the RHIC disaster scenario. In their report published in 1999, they argued that black hole formation from RHIC is highly unlikely. Further, they pointed out that in the five-billion-year life of the moon, approximately 10²⁸ collisions of the RHIC type have occurred. The number of collisions that will occur in ten years of running RHIC, 2 x 10¹¹, is fewer than happen each day on the moon. Their conclusion: “The candidate mechanisms for catastrophe scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments or both.”

However, reputable physicist Adrian Kent has questioned whether a proper risk assessment was done before proceeding with RHIC. The empirical data alone imply a catastrophic probability of about 10^-17.

Only by relying on theory does the risk approach zero. As Kent puts it, “When the destruction of the Earth is in question . . . it would be preferable not to have to rely on theoretical expectations alone.”

Still, I’m taking bets that it won’t happen.

Penrose was met with considerable skepticism, especially in the artificial intelligence community, which he was basically attempting to put out of business, and also among physicists who could not see what quantum gravity could possibly have to do with a large, hot structure such as the brain.

Penrose then teamed up with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff in proposing a model for how quantum mechanics operates in the brain. Here’s how they explain it:

According to the principles of OR [objective reduction, proposed by Penrose in his 1994 book Shadows of the Mind], superpositioned states each have their own space-time geometries. When the degree of coherent mass-energy difference leads to a sufficient separation of space-time geometry, the system must choose and decay (reduce, collapse) to a single universe state, thus preventing “multiple universes.” In this way, a transient superposition of slightly differing space-time geometries persists until an abrupt quantum classical reduction occurs and one or the other is chosen. Thus consciousness may involve self-perturbations of space-time geometry.

Hameroff was one of the subjects interviewed in the 2004 independent documentary film What the Bleep Do We Know? That film, along with the succeeding 2005 film and still-bestselling book The Secret, exploited the notion that quantum mechanics tells us we make our own reality (see Reality Check September 2007).

In his Scientific American column of January 2005, Michael Shermer gave Bleep a scathing review. Referring to the Penrose-Hameroff model, Shermer references my 1995 book The Unconscious Quantum that discusses their proposal in some detail as well as the general question of whether the brain is a quantum device. In particular, Shermer pointed to a criterion I applied for determining whether a system must be described by quantum mechanics: If the product of a typical mass (m), speed (v), and distance (d) for the particles of the system is on the order of Planck’s constant (h) or less, then you cannot use classical mechanics to describe it but must use quantum mechanics.

Applying the criterion to the brain, I used the typical mass of a neural transmitter molecule, its speed-based thermal motion, and the distance across the synapse to find mvd about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be necessarily present.

In a letter responding to Shermer’s column, Hameroff wrote:

To debunk our theory Shermer cites an assertion in a book by Victor Stenger that the product of mass, velocity and distance of a quantum system cannot exceed Planck’s constant. I’ve not seen this proposal in a peer reviewed journal, nor listed anywhere as a serious interpretation of quantum mechanics. But in any case Stenger’s assertion is disproven by Anton Zeilinger’s experimental demonstration of quantum wave behavior in fullerenes and biological porphyrin proteins. (Skepticism should cut both ways, Mr. Shermer.) Nonetheless I agree with Stenger that synaptic chemical transmission between neurons is completely classical. The quantum computations we propose are isolated in microtubules within neurons. Classical neurotransmission provides inputs to, and outputs from, microtubule quantum computations mediating consciousness in neuronal dendrites.

First of all, the criterion I proposed is based on textbook quantum mechanics, originating with Niels Bohr in 1913—hardly in need of peer review. Second, I present this as a criterion for the necessary use of quantum mechanics in which you cannot get away with using classical mechanics. I did note that macroscopic quantum systems such as lasers and superconductors exist. They rely on the phenomenon of quantum coherence that can act over large distances.

In any case, Hameroff admits he agrees with me on my conclusion that “synaptic chemical transmission between neurons is completely classical.” He says he and Penrose propose that the quantum effects occur in microtubules within neurons. Microtubules are hollow, cylindrical polymers that are part of the cytoskeleton of all cells. As I noted in my book, I am puzzled that the quantum effects described in this model happen only with brain cells and not, say, the cells of the big toe.

In a 1999 paper, physicist max Tegmark looked at the problem of quantum coherence in the brain and determined that the decoherence timescales would be ten or more orders of magnitude shorter than the timescales for an event in the brain. The brain is simply too large and too hot to be a quantum device, coherent or not.

It is safe to say that the Penrose-Hameroff model has not been supported by the evidence to the satisfaction of the great majority of neuroscientists. However, let us assume Penrose is right about the brain not being a strict algorithmic computer. A simple mechanism exists, well known to complexity theorists, that can enable the brain or an electronic circuit to act in a noncomputable way.

External sources in the environment such as cosmic rays or internal sources such as radioactive potassium (K40) in blood can be expected to induce fluctuations in brain currents. These processes are quantum in origin, which means that they are random—at least in most interpretations of quantum mechanics. Like the fluctuations that provide for mutations in the evolutionary process, these might serve to trigger what complexity theorists call a bifurcation, when a system moves from one quasi-stable state to another.

The brain could operate that way, being basically classical and deterministic but occasionally jolted by a random quantum event. What is interesting is that the decisions made in this fashion would be indistinguishable from creative acts or free will. Is that all there is to it?

Examples of such phenomena include extrasensory perception (ESP), mind-over-matter or psychokinesis (PK), provable out-of-body experiences (OBE), and near-death experiences (NDE) that are actual returns from the dead. Other related phenomena include demonstrated efficacy of distant intercessory prayer and the successful verification that humans have obtained revealed truths that they could not possibly know by natural means.

In several reviews and interviews, theologians and other commentators have noted that “No religion makes claims that humans possess ESP.” Now, I do not claim they do either. Nowhere do I argue, “ESP does not exist so therefore God does not exist.” I only hypothesize that some evidence for a spirit or soul should be found. This could be ESP, PK, OBE, NDE, prayers, revelations, or some other paranormal phenomenon that exceeds the capabilities of matter. I then take the fact that we see none of these to mean that a God who provided us with spirits or souls does not exist.

If we go back though the early history of psychic studies, which started in the mid 1800s, we see signs that most investigators were motivated by personal religiosity to find evidence for the soul or an immaterial force of some kind. After all, wireless telegraphy had been demonstrated; why not wireless telepathy? Let me just mention two early psychic researchers, each of whom held prominent status in physics and chemistry.

William Crookes (1832–1919) discovered the chemical elements thallium and selenium and invented the vacuum tube that was used to discover the electron. Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) transmitted radio signals before Marconi (but after Tesla) and invented spark-plug ignition as well as the vacuum tube that was used in electronic circuits and other devices well into the mid-twentieth century. Ignoring what he must have known were the proper protocols of good science, Crookes performed poorly controlled experiments with fraudulent mediums that he felt confirmed his already held belief in a spirit world. Lodge also allowed his personal beliefs to override any natural skepticism he would be expected to exhibit as a competent scientist. His son Raymond had been killed in Flanders in 1915, and Lodge insisted that Raymond was communicating with his family from beyond the grave. Lodge also allowed himself to be bamboozled by phony psychics.

A third major figure in the history of psychic research was Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980), who made an honest attempt to do careful laboratory tests of paranormal phenomena at Duke University (although cheating by others did take place in his lab). Rhine coined the term “ESP” and founded the Journal of Parapsychology after his submissions to conventional journals were continually turned down. Rhine was a religious man and hoped his work would help reconcile science and religion by finding scientific evidence for a nonphysical component in humans. He clearly did not regard observation of spiritual phenomena as beyond the capabilities of science.

Today’s parapsychologists are usually very careful about denying that they are drawing any supernatural conclusions when they claim evidence for a paranormal effect. In this way, they are able to position themselves a little closer to the fringe of science where the widely accepted dogma holds that science can say nothing about the supernatural. I have strongly criticized this assertion (see “Supernatural Science,” Skeptical Briefs, March 2006, pp. 11–15).

Let us imagine what would happen if well-controlled experiments on ESP found evidence that passes the most stringent tests that science can provide, leading even the most skeptical to admit that the phenomenon is real, thus requiring James Randi to award his million dollar prize. Surely scientists of every stripe would initially seek to explain the results in terms of known natural processes and perform experiments that would test the hypothesis.

For example, the strength of the ESP signal would be measured as a function of direction and distance from the source. If it fell off with the square of the distance, then this would be evidence that ESP emissions are a form of energy and probably a natural phenomenon. Indeed, at the suggestion of Einstein, Rhine performed such an experiment. When he found no “distance effect,” he concluded that the phenomenon was not physical. He avoided the more obvious conclusion that the phenomenon was not real.

If that experiment was duplicated with a clear ESP signal that did not fall off with distance, then we would have evidence that ESP violates energy conservation and does not behave as expected for a material force. While it would undoubtedly be argued that this result could still be natural, energy conservation is such a fundamental law of matter that its violation would be strong evidence for a reality beyond matter.

I imagine that parapsychologists would be delighted to see such an empirical result. How much more important to have discovered evidence for the soul—for a world beyond matter—than just another form of physical communication! And you can rest assured that theologians would readily change their tune about whether established evidence for ESP is evidence for a human soul.

What we see here is simply the reappearance of the ancient philosophical doctrine of idealism, this time arising from misinterpretations of certain quantum phenomena that strike many people as weird because they are not part of everyday experience.

In 1800, Thomas Young passed light through two narrow slits in an otherwise opaque screen. He observed alternating bright and dark bands of light on the surface illuminated by the light from the slits. This was interpreted as the pattern of interference between light waves emerging from each slit. Since then, science has treated light as a wave phenomenon.

In the early twentieth century, it was discovered that light also seems to be composed of localized particles called photons. In addition, objects such as electrons, which we normally think of as particles, also were seen to exhibit the interference behavior associated with waves.

Where does the mind come into all this? Well, it seems at first glance that whether an object is a wave or a particle depends on what you decide to measure. If you measure a wave property such as interference, then the object is a wave. If you decide to measure a particle property such as position, then the object is a particle.

For example, suppose in the double-slit experiment that we put a photon detector behind one slit. If the detector is on, then we know which slit the photon passed through and we get the two bright bands on the wall expected for a localized photon passing through either slit. In this case, the light is particle-like. If the detector is off, we get the interference pattern, and the light is wavelike.

Furthermore, we can set up the experiment so that the decision to measure a wave property or particle property is made after the object leaves the source. That source can be light from a galaxy thirteen billion light-years away. Some take this to mean that the mind not only can control the reality of whether an object is a particle or a wave, but it can do this over a distance equal to the size of the visible universe and thirteen billion years back in time.

At least, that’s the snake oil that Chopra and the Bleep and Secret crews are trying to sell us. In fact, it is easily shown to be bogus. We can set up a double-slit experiment in which the surface illuminated by the light from the slits contains an array of photon detectors sensitive at the one-photon level. Even with the slit detector off, we get individual, localized hits just as expected for particles. But as you accumulate data, a fascinating thing happens. The pattern of hits takes the shape of the same diffraction pattern first observed by Thomas Young in 1800!

So, the photon is not the wave; the wave is the statistical distribution of multiple photons. In quantum mechanics this wave is called the “wave function,” a mathematical tool used to compute the probability for finding a particle at a particular position.

Suppose we start out not knowing the position of a particle. Then the particle’s wave function is in some sense spread throughout the universe. It has the same magnitude at every spatial point. Then when a measurement is made, the particle’s position is found to be in some small region the size of the detector, and the wave function is therefore localized. Physicists say that the wave function has “collapsed” as the result of the measurement. Einstein called this a “spooky action at a distance,” since the collapse happens instantaneously throughout the universe. Again, it would seem that the act of conscious measurement has reached out in space at infinite speed to the farthest corner of the universe.

But there is nothing spooky about it. Suppose you are a resident of a planet in Alpha Centauri. Back on Earth, a friend enters your name in a lottery in which your chance of winning the prize of a million dollars is one in a million. If you win the lottery, your probability of winning collapses instantaneously to unity, and your wealth increases instantaneously by a million dollars. But it takes four years for the news, traveling at the speed of light, to reach you and your Centauri bank. You can’t start spending the money until that happens. That’s how it is in quantum physics. The collapse of the abstract wave function is just a mathematical artifice. Even though this happens at faster than the speed of light, any signal and other practical result will be limited by relativity and the laws of conventional physics.

In short, nothing in quantum mechanics requires that our minds be able to act across great distances and back in time to control reality as part of some cosmic consciousness. As Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Bayes’ theorem (Thomas Bayes, d. 1761) provides a means for directly calculating the probability of a statement being true based on the available evidence. In a 2003 book, The Probability of God (New York: Three Rivers Press), Stephen Unwin attempted to calculate the probability that God exists.

Unwin’s result: 67 percent. Physicist Larry Ford (private communication) has examined Unwin’s calculation and made his own estimate using the same formula. Ford’s result: 10^-17.

Here’s how the Bayesian method works. Let P(G) be the prior probability that a proposition G is true. Now, suppose we have some new evidence E. Let P(G|E) be the probability that G is true in light of the evidence E. Let P(E|G) be the probability that E is true if G is true and P(E|G*) be the probability that E is true if G is false. Then is it easy to prove that

This is Bayes’ Theorem. Let G be the proposition that God exists. Unwin rewrites (1) as

where

he calls the “divine indicator,” which represents how much more likely the evidence E would be if God exists compared with him not existing.

Unwin then puts in some numbers. He takes the prior probability of God existing, that is, the probability before any evidence is submitted, to be Pbefore=0.5. Then he introduces a series of six observations and estimates the divine indicator D for each. At each step he calculates a Pafter and equates that to Pbefore for the following step.

1. The evidence for goodness, such as altruism: D=10 fi Pafter = 0.91.
2. The evidence for moral evil, done by humans: D=0.5 fi Pafter =0.83.
3. The evidence for natural evil (natural disasters): D=0.1 fi Pafter =0.33.
4. The evidence for “intra-natural” miracles (successful prayers, etc.): D=2 fi Pafter =0.5.
5. The evidence for “extra-natural” miracles (direct intervention by God in nature): D=1 fi Pafter = 0.5.
6. The evidence for religious experience (feeling of awe, etc.): D=2 fi Pafter = 0.67.

Unwin then adds a boost based on faith raising the final probability of God to 0.95.

Now let’s look at Ford’s alternate estimate of these numbers. First he notes: “propositions that postulate existence have a far less than 50 percent chance of being correct.” That is in absence of any evidence or other reason for us to believe some entity exists, it is highly unlikely that it does. So the prior probability of God should be more like one in a million or less. So let’s take Pbefore =10^-6.

With respect to the divine indicator, D, we must evaluate it for each kind of evidence. Taking miracles for example, P(E|G) is the probability of the observed evidence of miracles given God exists. We see no evidence of miracles, and since God should be producing them if he existed, this probability is small. On the other hand, the absence of evidence for miracles is just what we expect if there is no God, so P(E|G*) is near one. Consequently, the divine indicator based on the absence of evidence for miracles is D < 1.

Unwin exhibits the typical theistic fallacy that goodness can only come from God and assigns a high divine indicator D=10 for this. Ford points out that we should see a lot more goodness in the world than we do if God exists. So he assumes D=0.1.

Ford notes that the existence of both moral and natural evil in the world is evidence against God’s existence. Unwin seems to agree by assigning D-values less than one, but not sufficiently low to describe the true situation in which millions die or suffer needlessly each year from the evils of both humanity and nature. Ford’s values of D=0.01 and D=0.001 for moral and natural evil respectively, are far more reasonable.

Unwin thinks that miracles such as prayers being answered have been observed and so assigns a diving indicator D=2 to what he calls intra-natural miracles. However, the scientific fact is that the best, controlled experiments on intercessory prayer show no positive effects. These scientific results make Ford’s estimate of D=0.01 in better agreement with the data.

Unwin assigns D=1 for extra-natural miracles where God intervenes directly in nature. Since there is not a scintilla of evidence that God does this, including the fact that no miracle was required to bring the universe into existence, Ford’s estimate of D=0.1 for this property actually strikes me as far too generous.

Finally, there is no evidence that so-called religious experiences have any divine content. If they did, we would expect the people having them to return with information about reality that they could not have known before the experience. These “prophecies” could be tested scientifically to see of they came true. None ever have. So, instead of Unwin’s D=2, Ford’s D=0.01 is also more reasonable.

In any case, here is the summary of Ford’s calculation: P_before = 10^-6.

1. The evidence for goodness, such as altruism: D=0.1 fi P_after =10^-7.
2. The evidence for moral evil, done by humans: D = 0.01 fi P_after =10^-9.
3. The evidence for natural evil (natural disasters): D = 0.001 fi P_after =10^-12.
4. The evidence for “intra-natural” miracles (successful prayers, etc.): D=0.01 fi P_after =10^-14.
5. The evidence for “extra-natural” miracles (direct intervention by God in nature): D=0.1 fi P_after =10^-15.
6. The evidence for religious experience (feeling of awe, etc.): D =0.01 fi P_after =10^-17.

Of course, many of you are likely to say this is a silly exercise, that the numbers used are a matter of taste and obvious prejudice. However, I think it is useful to go through it anyway. The mathematically challenged are often awed by any sort of quantitative calculation, which they are unable to evaluate, and are likely to view Unwin’s work as providing scientific support for their beliefs. It does no such thing. Unwin loses. If anything, his method demonstrates the high unlikelihood of God’s existence.

Clearly, many conceptual problems are associated with this question. How do we define nothing? What are its properties? If it has properties, doesn't that make it something? The theist claims that God is the answer. But, then, why is there God rather than nothing? Assuming we can define nothing, why should nothing be a more natural state of affairs than something?

In fact, we can give a plausible scientific reason based on our best current knowledge of physics that something is more natural than nothing! Of course, that requires providing a physical definition of nothing. Can I imagine a physical system that has no properties? Yes, as long as you do not insist on playing word games with me by calling the lack of properties a property.

Suppose we remove all the particles and any possible non-particulate energy from some unbounded region of space. Then we have no mass, no energy, or any other physical property. This includes space and time, if you accept that these are relational properties that depend on the presence of matter to be meaningful.

While we can never produce this physical nothing in practice, we have the theoretical tools to describe a system with no particles. The methods of quantum field theory provide the means to move mathematically from a state with n particles to a state of more or fewer particles, including zero particles. If an n-particle state can be described, then so can a state with n = 0.

Let us start with a monochromatic electromagnetic field, which is described quantum mechanically as system of n photons of equal energy E. The mathematical description of the field is equivalent to a harmonic oscillator whose quantum solution is a series of energy levels equally spaced like the rungs of a ladder by an amount E, each rung representing a field with one more photon than the field represented by the rung below. Stepping down the ladder you find that the bottom rung corresponding to a field of zero photons is not zero energy but rather E/2. This is called the zero-point energy.

This result is true for all bosons, particles that have zero or integral spin. On the other hand, fermions that have half-integral spin, such as the electron and quark, have a zero-point energy of -E/2 (negative energy is no problem in relativistic quantum mechanics; in fact, it is required by the simple mathematical fact that a square root has two possible signs).

In the current universe, bosons outnumber fermions by a factor of a billion. This has led people to conclude that the vacuum energy of the universe, identified with the zero point energy remaining after all matter is removed, is very large. A simple calculation indicates that the energy density of the vacuum is 120 orders of magnitude greater than its experimental upper limit. Clearly this estimate is wrong. This calculation must be one of the worst in scientific history! Since a non-particulate vacuum’s energy density is proportional to Einstein’s cosmological constant, this is called the cosmological constant problem.

Instead of using numbers from the current universe, we can visualize a vacuum with equal numbers of bosons and fermions. Such a vacuum might have existed at the very beginning of the big bang. Indeed this is exactly what is to be expected if the vacuum out of which the universe emerged was supersymmetric-that is made no distinction between bosons and fermions.

This suggests a more precise definition of nothing. Nothing is a state that is the simplest of all conceivable states. It has no mass, no energy, no space, no time, no spin, no bosons, no fermions-nothing.

Then why is there something rather than nothing? Because something is the more natural state of affairs and is thus more likely than nothing-more than twice as likely according to one calculation. We can infer this from the processes of nature where simple systems tend to be unstable and often spontaneously transform into more complex ones. Theoretical models such as the inflationary model of the early universe bear this out.

Consider the example of the snowflake. Our experience tells us that a snowflake is very ephemeral, melting quickly to drops of liquid water that exhibit far less structure. But that is only because we live in a relatively high temperature environment, where collisions with molecules in thermal motion reduce the fragile arrangement of crystals to a simpler liquid. Energy is required to destroy the structure of a snowflake.

But consider an environment where the ambient temperature is well below the melting point of ice, as it is in most of the universe far from the highly localized effects of stellar heating. In such an environment, any water vapor would readily crystallize into complex structures. Snowflakes would be eternal, or at least will remain intact until cosmic rays tear them apart.

What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.

As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

I gave one striking example in my Skeptical Briefs column of June, 1999 (available here) that bears repeating.

Physicist Harold Puthoff and others have argued that an inexhaustible supply of “free energy” might someday be extracted from the vacuum—given a sufficient investment in their research, of course. I took the equation for the stored energy between two plates, which appears in Puthoff’s papers and has been verified empirically, and put in some numbers. I calculated that two highly polished metal plates 200 kilometers by 200 kilometers on a side separated by one micron (a millionth of a meter) have enough potential energy to light a 100-Watt light bulb for one second. If we were to stumble upon 30 million or so of these structures out in space, we could hook them up to our light bulb and keep it lit for a year. Unfortunately, astronomers have not yet observed such structures in the space near Earth where they might be utilized.

In another example, I was recently contacted by The History Channel to possibly appear in a program they planned on The Philadelphia Experiment (see here). This legend has appeared in several books. As the story goes, in 1943 the U.S. Navy was conducting experiments in the Philadelphia Naval Yards on making ships invisible when a destroyer was accidentally teleported to Norfolk, Virginia and back.

The destroyer, USS Eldridge, was supposedly fitted with an electromagnetic generator designed to bend light around the ship. Now, light is made of electrically neutral photons, which are not deflected by electromagnetic fields. However, Einstein’s “unified field theory,” was supposedly applied, with Uncle Al himself said to be a participant. As near as I can tell, the generator was to produce a gravitational field great enough to bend the light.

Of course, the bending of light by gravity was one of the triumphant predictions of Einstein’s earlier general theory of relativity that has been successfully tested during total solar eclipses. (Einstein never succeeded in developing his unified theory.) General relativity is perfectly quantitative, so let’s put in the numbers. The angular deflection is proportional to the mass of the gravitating body and inversely proportion to the impact parameter (distance to center at closest approach) and amounts to 1.75 seconds of arc for a light ray just grazing the surface. The gravitational deflection of a light ray around an object with the mass of the Eldridge (1,240 tons) with an impact parameter of, say, 100 meters would be 3x10-16 arc seconds, hardly enough to make it invisible. If the role of the electromagnetic generator were to somehow produce the equivalence of a large gravitating mass, then for a one-degree deflection that mass would have to be over a trillion-trillion tons.

This, however, is not the end of the story. According to reports, on October 28, 1943 the Eldridge vanished from Philadelphia and simultaneously appeared 600 km away at the U.S. Naval base at Norfolk. After a few minutes it vanished again and reappeared in Philadelphia.

The Navy and ship crew denied the whole story, but that is, of course, a cover up according to proponents, who claim the event was an accidental case of “teleportation,” so familiar to us all from Star Trek.

Here again we can make a quantitative estimate of what would be involved. This year is the hundredth anniversary of what science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc2 (they all have a macro for this in their word processors). The famous equation presumably makes it physically possible to convert mass into energy, propagate the energy through space, and then convert it back to mass some distance away. Well, if you set m equal to the mass of the Eldridge and multiply it by c2, after putting in some conversion factors you obtain the energy equivalent of 20 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs. I think this effect might have been noticed.

I invite the reader to make another calculation: What is the total number of bits of information that would have to be transmitted in order to exactly reconstruct the Eldridge in Norfolk, and again back in Philadelphia?

As is always the case with pseudoscientific cons, the various terms and concepts that are being exploited can be found in legitimate scientific literature. In this case, we can read about “quantum teleportation,” experiments in which an unknown quantum state is destroyed at one point in space and recreated at another distant point using a quantum effect known as “entanglement.”

Here information is transmitted, not matter—just as in any ordinary electromagnetic communication. The fact that it is quantum information, measured in “qubits” rather than bits holds the promise of future higher information communication. But that technology is still well in the future and hardly conceivable in 1943.

Information cannot be sent by quantum teleportation to some arbitrary location, but to a prepared receiver. Basically you start with two particles, such as photons, in an entangled state. You send one photon to the sender and the other to the receiver. The sender then combines her photon with another in an unknown quantum state and performs a measurement on the resulting state. Since measurements “collapse” quantum states, the result is a classical, disentangled state. The sender then transmits a classical signal in that state to the receiver. The receiver combines that signal with his entangled photon to reconstruct the original, unknown quantum state.

Note that the signal is not transmitted faster than the speed of light. This is not a case of so-called “nonlocal” communication via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, which is provably impossible. Somehow it seems rather unlikely that the accidental quantum teleportation of a ship and crew took place in Philadelphia back in 1943

A few months ago, the Smithsonian Institution agreed to cosponsor a film called The Privileged Planet for a special showing at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The film was based on the 2004 book of the same title by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and theologian Jay Richards, but the story starts about four years earlier.

In their 2000 book Rare Earth, paleontologist Peter T. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee argued that complex forms of life are uncommon if not exceedingly rare in the universe. Gonzalez was at the time a colleague of these authors at the University of Washington and a major scientific consultant for Rare Earth.

Rare Earth did not represent the views of most investigators in the fledgling field of astrobiology, who are generally more optimistic about the chances of other forms of intelligent life in the universe. In his follow-up 2001 book, Life Everywhere, astronomer David Darling rebutted the arguments in Rare Earth one by one. While not concluding outright that complex life fills the universe, Darling pointed out that we simply do not yet have sufficient knowledge to conclude that such life is rare. Both sides of the debate actually agree that simple, primitive forms of life may be common. However, even today’s most optimistic estimates place Earthlike planets hundreds if not thousands of light-years apart on average.

The Privileged Planet ignores Darling and the consensus of astrobiologists in adopting the Rare Earth position. However, Gonzalez and Richards go much further. They contend that conditions on Earth, particularly those that make human life possible, have been optimized for scientific investigation and that this constitutes “a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we've been willing to expect or imagine.” Makes you wonder what intelligence they have in mind.

Following this line of reasoning, the atmosphere of Earth is not only transparent in the visible spectral band so that humans can see with their eyes, but it is also designed in this way so that astronomers can build telescopes and thereby observe the fruits of intelligence in the heavens.

Have you ever wondered why the angular diameters of the moon and sun as viewed from Earth are almost exactly the same, though the two celestial objects differ greatly in size and distance from Earth? Without that coincidence, we would never experience the type of total eclipse of the sun in which we can actually view starlight near the edge of the sun’s disc as the moon blocks off the sun’s light.

Gonzalez and Richards marvel at the fact that we happen to live on a planet where total solar eclipses are observable and present this as a prime example of design for discovery. Indeed, science may have been triggered when, in 585 b.c.e., Thales of Miletus predicted a total eclipse that supposedly ended a war. In more recent times, observations made during total eclipses have been used to verify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, specifically the bending of starlight near the sun’s rim. Gonzalez and Richards seem to think general relativity would not have been discovered (assuming that the theories of physics are “out there” to be discovered) had we lived on a planet without the coincidence of angular diameters. That is very dubious, since many other tests of general relativity have been made that do not involve eclipses.

At the time that Gonzalez worked with Ward and Brownlee, he was also a frequent contributor to the newsletter Connections and other pamphlets published by Hugh Ross’s evangelical organization, Reasons to Believe. In these writings, Gonzalez presented many of the arguments for cosmic design later published in The Privileged Planet.

Darling discloses that Ward and Brownlee were apparently unaware of Gonzalez’s theological views, which Gonzalez admits he kept to himself at the University of Washington “because of the open hostility to such views among many faculty.” Gonzalez has since moved to Iowa State University, where he presumably finds the atmosphere more congenial.

The Smithsonian was also apparently unaware of the fact that the Discovery Institute, the well-funded organization based in Seattle that is leading the political battle to weaken the teaching of evolution in the schools and install Intelligent Design pseudoscience, had produced the film. The Smithsonian initially accepted a $16,000 fee for the showing, not realizing that their own rules against presenting political or religious material were being violated.

The well-documented purpose of the Discovery Institute and its arm, the Center for Science and Culture (originally the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture), is to drive “wedges” between materialistic science and the rest of society and to redraw science and culture along evangelical-Christian lines. Gonzalez and Richards are fellows of the Center. Other fellows include Intelligent Design gurus Michael Behe and William Dembski and master debater William Lane Craig.

When, after intense media attention, the religious nature of the film came into the open, the Smithsonian withdrew its cosponsorship, stating: “We have determined that the content of the film is not consistent with the mission of the Smithsonian Institution’s scientific research.” They allowed the film to be shown but turned down the payment.

Of course, Gonzalez and Richards are entitled to their views, but this tale provides yet another illustration of the stealthy nature of the strategy behind the Discovery campaign to “renew science and culture.” The Privileged Planet represents a new, cosmic wedge in the Discovery arsenal. (Why can’t one have an arsenal of wedges?) It joins with Intelligent Design as another form of stealth creationism, claiming to be science but motivated by religion. We can only wonder why a group of people who claim a special pipeline to the source of truth and morality feel they can’t be honest with the rest of us.

Much is made of human space flight. It is hyped as the search for new worlds akin to the explorations on Earth during the Age of Discovery. Space operas like Star Trek lead people to think that someday all we will have to do is hop in a spaceship and cross the galaxy at warp speed. Every planet we land on will have an atmosphere and other conditions sufficiently like Earth that we will be able to walk around without spacesuits. In this way, it is widely imagined, humanity will gradually populate the cosmos.

This is very unlikely ever to happen. The chance of humans finding new worlds to live on without extensive life support is very small. A spaceship moving at 11.1 kilometers per second, the escape velocity for Earth, would take 114,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. That same spaceship would take 3 billion years to cross our galaxy.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity makes it possible in principle to reach any place in the universe in the lifetime of an astronaut onboard a spacecraft. The ship just has to go fast enough relative to Earth.

In order to reach the next nearest galaxy (excluding the Magellanic Clouds just outside the Milky Way), Andromeda, in ten years ship-time, the ship would have to travel very close to the speed of light. By the time the ship reached Andromeda, 2.3 million years would have elapsed on Earth. That is longer than the time Homo sapiens have been Homo sapiens. Any humans exploring the universe will effectively cut themselves off from Earth. Even if they traveled to Andromeda and back, aging only twenty years in the process, they would return to an Earth almost five million years in the future as measured on Earth clocks.

Notice that I have not used any technological limitations to argue that space flight to distant stars and galaxies is impossible. While a method for accelerating a spaceship to near the speed of light is beyond any technology we can currently imagine, I will not rule that out for future generations. People also speculate about traveling through wormholes, tunnels through space-time that act as shortcuts to other parts of the universe. I don’t know if that will ever prove possible, but I doubt it.

The amount of effort that is needed to provide life support for humans in space makes it clear that we did not evolve to live in space. Life on Earth evolved under the very special set of conditions that exist here. The Sun is a stable source of energy. The orbit of Earth is almost an exact circle, which keeps us from experiencing too great a variation in temperature. Planets in multiple star systems, such as Alpha Centauri, of which Proxima Centauri is a member, would not have such gravitational stability, making them unlikely candidates for life.

Earth’s distance from the Sun is such that temperatures on our world are very suitable for the evolution of life structures based on carbon chemistry. The materials on Earth-large amounts of water, an atmosphere containing oxygen, a surface containing carbon and other elements, have made life possible.

By a fortunate coincidence, the spectrum of radiation from the Sun is maximal in the same wavelength region where the transparency of Earth’s atmosphere is maximal. These conditions, and many more, provide the delicate balance needed for complex carbon structures to survive on Earth. No other planet in the solar system has such conditions, and it seems likely that future star trekkers will never find another planet in our galaxy where humans could live without substantial life-support systems.

Notice also that I am not denying the possibility of some kind of life elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, I regard that as very likely. Here I am talking about Earthly life, specifically humans.

The suggestion is frequently made that humanity might someday live in outer space, inside space stations orbiting Earth and other planets. However, even if these space stations duplicate all the conditions on Earth, they may not be able to deal with the cosmic rays from which we on Earth are shielded by the atmosphere. The same threat prohibits lengthy space travel. The types of Mars missions people dream about would expose astronauts to life-shortening radiation poisoning.

Perhaps future technologies will solve this problem, too. Maybe genetic engineering will make new kinds of humans, really a new species, suitable for space travel. And, of course, we can always send automatons. The fact remains that humans are not constructed to live unsupported anywhere but on this tiny blue speck in a vast universe. Our species is marooned in space, on spaceship Earth.