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I spent the weekend in the midlands, doing some walking with my Mum and her walking group. Sunday was a real scorcher and we had a long walk by the river Barrow. More a trudge really., with only the odd river cruiser negotiating the locks for company. Like all walks, it turned out to be at least an hour longer than planned. What I mainly took out of it is that there is a big difference between walking up a mountain and walking along a river – one stretch along a river is much like another and you think it’s never going to end.

Another thing that ocurred to me as we trudged along is that there are land people and sea people. On a hot day, I’d far rather be on the sea, and get quite frustrated inland. Somehow those small, dusty towns are worse in the sun. To me, it doesn’t really matter if you’re sailing, windsurfing, surfing or whatever. If you like the sea, that’s where you need to be. Luckily, I live in a village by the sea!

Which reminds me, I must buy a dinghy this summer. I keep putting it off, as I travel a lot in summer. Last year, I had a nice windsurfer I got great use out of, until someone stole the board out of my garden. Now it looks like I’ll need a whole new rig. Thanks, pal.

After the long walk, there was a deafening country n western band playing in the hotel. Yippe I-ay etc, at full decibels. This seems to be a permanent feature of hotels in the midlands, I wonder why. Something to do with farmers and cowboys? Strange.

Today was the last day of the conference, with plenty of good talks, although many of us were tired after last night.

Yesterday evening, we were treated to some traditional Irish music courtesy of Dr Collete O’ Mahony, one of the conference participants and director of the WIT Traditional Music Group. The group played some great music and we even had a full ceilidh, with fear-an-ti showing the visitors the steps (ok not just the visitors!). So much more fun than the usual ‘live entertainment’ of some bloke with a mike playing rock music far too loud. Only the Irish could have a ceilidh at a theology conference…

Today’s talks were very interesting, with one on sin, guilt and forgiveness by Fergus Hogan of WIT. Not your average technical science talk then..

The conference finished with a plenary talk by Professor Eamonn Conway, a well-known theologian from Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. This was a serious full-on talk on the role of theology in modern society. From a scientist’s perspective, it’s very interesting to see the difference between these guys, the thinking theologians, and the fundamentalist types, a very different species. I took about 3 pages of notes, but I think the presentation will be on the conference webpage in a few days.

Eamonn in action: I didn’t know theologians used graphs (or blackboards)

One good quote we got from Eamonn arose from a comment of mine to Fergus – I had pointed out that guilt doesn’t need God as a reference point, to which Eamonn responded “something isn’t wrong because the Church says so…the Church says so because it’s wrong”

I was also pleased Eamonn referred to Jim Mackey quite a few times – Mackey is a very good philosopher and his recent book The Critique of Theological Reason has been under attack from some theologians recently…

After lunch, I was sorry to see the conference come to an end. I wouldn’t mind going to a few more of these in the future, not at all what I expected…

Update:12th May

Rysiek has a whole bunch of photos of the conference – you can see the whole lot here, they’re very very good. We’re still waiting for the podcast..

Well done Rysiek!

You’d think it’d be an easy week for staff while the hapless students prepare for exams – in fact there seems to be a huge number of conferences around the college this week. Not least of which is the SophiaEuropa Conference ‘Knowledge, Truth and Wisdom: Science, Religion and Culture in Shaping Europe’, mentioned in previous posts.

The conference started yesterday morning with a sociology session. There’s far too much to list here, but I must say I thoroughly enjoyed The Search for Meaning: Between Science and Religion, by keynote speaker Pofessor Tom Inglis of UCD. Dr Gary McDarby also gave an interesting talk, Technology Enhamced Evolution in the Absence of a Loving God, where he highlighted concerns that the pace of technological discovery has far outstripped our consideration of its effects on society.

There were a whole bunch of talks this morning that were also interesting. I think there will be a description of the talks on the conference website soon, but I must say I really liked Thomas Moellenbeck‘s talk on the famous argument from design (see posts below). Thomas presented a comparison of the argument from design as articulated recently by Cardinal von Schborn (‘intelligent design’), and that of Cardinal Newman – it seems Newman felt such arguments lead straight to atheism!

I gave my own spiel then, a truncated version of my public seminar on the Big Bang (see The Big Bang and the Mind of God posts below). Of course I used up most of the session presenting the basic evidence and theory of the model, before getting to the philosophical implications, but I think that’s the price you pay for tackling modern subjects. It’s worth doing this – after all, not everyone knows that a prediction of modern physics is that the universe may not have a ‘before’ (from general relativity) or even a ’cause’ (from quantum). There wasn’t really time to go into Hawking’s analogue of God and the Queen (below), but I enjoyed giving the talk. Afterwards, the questions were tough enough, as you might expect in a roomful of theologians.

Professor Eamonn Conway of Mary Immaculate College, Eric Weislogel (Executive Director of Metanexus, sponsors of the conference), and I then went off for a radio discussion on WLR. I must say I thought the DJ (Billy McCarthy) did a very good job of probing our different positions on life, the universe and everything, with Eric acting as umpire between Eamonn and I. It goes out tomorrow morning sometime, must remember to record it while we’re at the conference…

POSTSCRIPT

When I finally made it back to my office this afternoon, I noticed a Materials Conference in full swing in the adjacent building. I had a look at the posters and the schedule of talks. You know what, I don’t miss technical research at all. I far prefer interdisciplinary debates with philosophers and theologians on the meaning of science etc…pity it took me so many years to figure this out!

The experience with my car (below) made me think a bit. In fact, I often get asked about my position on global warming, now that I’m a ‘public scientist’. I don’t know about ‘position’ – but I do know something of how science is done. Meaning that scientific discovery is based on evidence, evidence that is interpretetd by PWKs (people who know what they’re talking about). So if the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists tell us we have something to worry about, we have something to worry about.

The key discovery was in the 1970s, when it was first realised that global climate might be an unstable system, i.e. a system where a small perturbation could easily result in a large effect. (There is a very nice description of this discovery in the book ‘The Discovery of Global Warming’ by Spencer Weart).

Nowadays, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that

(i) the atmosphere is heating up (the part near the earth, that is)

(ii) the rate is unprecedented

(iii) the phenomenon is almost certainly due to human activity (e.g. carbon emissions)

These results have been confirmed by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, an unprecedented global coalition of scientists. Despite much debate over details, there isn’t much debate about the overall trend (except among a tiny minority of scientists, some of whom who have an industry bias). Of course there are also genuine scientific doubters, but the consensus is pretty clear…

The debate now more concerns what action to take – in other words how to reduce emissions without triggering a recession. There is certainly sharp disagreement here, but on close inspection it is more between scientists and economists. For example, it’s worth noting that Bjorn Lomborg, the prominent skeptic, is not in fact a scientist at all. Lomborg, and several other economists and political scientists, claim that tackling emissions would be very inefficient and essentially a waste of money that would be better spent elsewhere. However, scientists point out that many such commentators have two things in common –

1. They tend to play down the evidence of warming (Lomborg’s infamous book The Skeptical Environmentalist is a prime example of this)

2. They ignore the possibilty of a tipping point. What scientists worry most about is that a threshold may exist, beyond which there may be no going back as positive feedback mechanisms kick in … a frightening scenario

So the great global warming debate is beginning to look like a debate between scientists (who don’t really understand economics) and economists (who don’t really understand science). For my part, I find Lomborg’s grasp of scientific uncertainty highly suspect (economics can be spectacularly wrong in a way science never is)..pretty worrying in a man who was recently voted one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time Magazine…

What happens if Lomborg’s wrong? I often wonder if those who make a career out of questioning the consensus ever doubt themselves. If we do sail past a tipping point, thanks to delayed action due to the skeptics, they will have a lot to answer for…

I finally got the report on my car from the garage a few days ago.

It needs, ah, a new engine, the guy said apologetically.

I was too shocked to say anything at first – of course, I had known there ws something up with the car for some time – the temperature needle kept jumping up from time to time, and she needed water every week or so. ‘Sounds like a head gasket’, my mechanic opined wisely some time ago.

I never got round to leaving the car in, partly because I was busy and he was busy. Now it appears I sailed blithely past some sort of tipping point and the damn thing needs a whole new engine. So do I spend a couple of grand on an engine for an 03 car? Or do I just move on?

Does this remind you of anything? At least I can buy a new car…you can’t buy a new planet

Phew, that’s over. Contrary to expectations, we got a very good turnout for last night’s seminar ‘The Big Bang and the Mind of God’ (I got the title from the last line of A Brief History of Time). Many thanks to those of you who came along, a good crowd always makes for a good atmosphere…

I probably let the science part of the talk go on a bit long, but I wanted to give a decent overview of the evidence for the Bang, and the theory behind it, before tackling the theology side of things. I’ve left the slides I used for the talk on the My Files page of this blog in case anybody’s interested (just click on the My Files tab at the top of this page and select the file from the list) or here

The discussion session afterwards was great – absolutely loads of questions, from all parts of the religious spectrum. For the discussion, I was joined by the chair Dr Micheal Howlett, who is both a scientist and a theologian and between our different answers to questions there was probably a good balance. A good representation of what the SopiaEuropa project is all about, I suspect. In any event, the discussion continued until the porters threw us out, a good sign.

A couple of interesting points came up – a colleague had a problem with my take on the Church of England (I referred to it being founded on the principle that Henry VIII wanted to get his leg over!) and he made some fair points concerning the English reformation. However, I still feel good ol’ Henry took opportunistic advantage of the upheavals in the Church in his attempts to sire a legitimite son, a good example of how a whole new Church can arise for no good reason….must look up more on this…

chancer

Another speaker felt that arguments concerning evolution were weakened by constant reference to Darwin! Of course science has moved on, but, as far as I know, despite some gaps, the theory of natural selection, as proposed by Darwin, is in very good health indeed, and is regarded as one of the fundamental mechanisms for evolution, resulting in the complexity we see (certainly not chance!).

We managed to record the discussion session, I’ll try and upload it later…..there will be a lot more on the topic of science and religion at next week’s SopiaEuropa conference at WIT…Cormac

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Update

There is a very good overview of evolution in last week’s edition of New Scientist. It’s a nice succinct account and explains how Darwin’s model has stood firm as the bedrock of today’s theory and evidence.

Re the convergence of science and religion, another point struck me during the talk. I was describing how the major religions not only differ, but are mutually exclusive, and how this position has remained essentially unchanged for millenia. It ocurred to me that this is another major obstacle for convergence; how can science converge with religion, if different religions diverge from one another?

Finally, Micheal H commented that I used the phrase ‘scientists believe’ a few times during the lecture, pointing out the similarity with religious phraseology! However, I think the similarity is only superficial – in fact, scientists use the word belief in the opposite sense to that of the devout. When scientists say “such-and-such looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, therefore we believe it to be a duck…”, we use the word ‘believe’ to soften the statement. The word conveys the idea that this is the current thinking, which could one day change should new evidence emerge…
By contrast, the devout use the word ‘belief’ in the opposite sense…e.g. “it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but we believe it to be a rhinocerous”, means that the observer will stick to this belief, irrespective of what evidence emerges…and that is the point of faith. A legitimate viewpoint, you might argue…but what happens when this viewpoint collides with known fact, or indeed with contrasting religions?

In preparation for tommorow’s talk on science and religion, I went looking for notes I took at the One-World Conference, a conference on Art, Religion and Science at University College Cork last summer. I wasn’t expecting that much at the time, I really only went along because John Polkinghorne, a well-known particle physicist and theologian who had known my father, was giving a talk on science and religion.

In the event, Polkinghore gave a cracking talk on particle physics, clear and precise. I no longer remember the details (one reason for this blog), but I remember that although I didn’t agree with his conclusions on the implications for religion, it was a very enjoyable talk. We had arranged to meet for coffee afterwards and I thoroughly enjoyed his memories of meeting Lochlainn at conferences…

The philosopher Jim Mackey of Edinburgh University was also at the conference. He too gave a great talk, in his typical blunt style, on the misrepresentation of scripture in art. (I remembered Jim from before, with good reason – once while I was attempting to give a seminar on the philosophy of quantum theory, Jim asked all sorts of difficult questions on the Hesienberg Uncertainty Principle!). There were a couple of other good talks afterwards, but I don’t remember the rest…

At the end of the conference, I gave Jim a lift home – nothing like a 2-hour car journey with a distinguished philosopher! All in all, ‘One-World’ was a very pleasant experience as my first theology conference…hope next week’s SopiaEuropa conference at WIT is of similar standard

A third argument postulated by theologians is the ‘something from nothing’ argument; Dawkins doesn’t say much about the physics of this this in his book, but modern physics certainly has an answer. Put simply, the total energy content of the universe may well be zero – if so, it is entirely possible that the universe arose as a quantum fluctuation (see earlier post).

A more serious problem between religion and science is of course scripture – there is quite strong disagreement between several passages in the Book of Genesis and scientific fact e.g.

Earth is not stationary

Sun does not orbit the earth

Age of earth is wrong

Age of sun is wrong

Timeframe of creation is wrong

One solution is to take a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, as suggestioned by Augustine. However, this raises 2 problems

(i) as hardliners point out, where does the slide stop?

(ii) many Christians insist on a literal interpretation, resuting in statements like

Any theory of origins that is contrary to the early chapters

of Genesis is not true and will not stand the test of time’

…not so reasonable

Ok, so from the point of view of modern cosmology, we can postulate a beginning without the need for a creator [in a nutshell, although our best theory of gravity cannot give a successful description of the universe when it was of atomic dimensions, quantum physics predicts that the universe could in principle have arisen out of nothing, see posts below].

It is interesting to turn the problem around, and look at it from the point of religion. The most famous arguments concerning the origin of the universe were first put by St Thomas of Aquinas

His main arguments were basically

1. Everything observable has a cause outside itself, therefore the universe must have a cause outside itself – by a process of regression this can only be God.

2. The natural world is much too complicated not to have been designed by deity.

it is often pointed out that the problem with the first argument is that it is not entirely self-consistent – it assumes God does not have a cause. Also, it is not clear that God should be omnipotent etc

The second argument seems to me to be a perfectly valid and powerful argument for a 10th century philosopher. It is not so valid for modern philosophers. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution provides a powerful explanation of how complex organisms arise from simple origins – certainly not by chance, but by a process of natural selection (the theory is of course backed up by extensive fossil evidence). In modern cosmology, a similar argument applies – much of the apparent fine-tuning is not independent, but deeply inter-related (see below).

The complexity argument for the existence of God has become very popular recently, especially in the US – this is the famous Intelligent Design (ID) argument (see the Answers in Genesis website) . it seems to me that the argument has progressed v little beyond the Aquinas argument: except that St Thomas did not know what we know now, whether it is evidence from the fossil record of mammals, or evidence from the sub-atomic world of particle physics.

This raises a tricky point for religion. Since the time of Galileo, the Church has learnt that religion should provide an explanation for our existence that does not contradict known facts – otherwise it becomes enforced dogma, not personal faith (blind faith rather than faith). As science progresses, this task does not become easier, but more difficult…Richard Dawkins has a good discussion on this in chapter 4 of his recent book ‘The God Delusion’

I agreed to give a public lecture on science and religion here at WIT next week, as part of the SophiaEuropa Research Project on Culture, Technology and Religion. I’ve decided to talk about the Big Bang model – after all, the origin of the universe is a topic of interest to most people, and it’s interesting to consider whether science and religion converge or diverge in their approach to the topic.

How to go about it? I think I’ll start with an overview of the physical evidence for the Big Bang model, and touch on the theoretical framework in which it rests. Then it’ll be fun to consider how the singularity problem fits with models of Christianity. A few points I’ve noticed in my reading around I think I’ll touch on…

1. Philosophers and theologians tend to consider scientific models as if they were pure theory, ready to be overturned at any moment. I don’t think this is right as it ignores the role of evidence in the scientific method. Modern science is often incomplete, but rarely downright wrong (for example, the evidence suggests that general relativity is a more accurate theory of gravity than Newton’s Universal Law, but we send men to the moon using Newtonian gravity and it works fine). Because the scientific method is based on evidence that doesn’t go away, new theories do not ‘overturn’ old ones, they broaden and deepen them.

2. Another common misconception is the ‘fine-tuning’ of nature: it is amazing that all the various constants of nature are so suitable for the universe and life on earth to have evolved as it did. But this should never be stated without some reference to ‘unification’ – as physics progresses, we discover more and more arbitrary parameters turn out not to be independent, but deeply related to a tiny number of fundamental parameters (for example, where we once thought there were four fundamental ‘forces ‘of nature, each with it’s own coupling constant, modern theory predicts that there was probably one fundamental force, that gradually split off into four..)

3. You might think the’singularity’ fits very well with the Christian view of a creation and a creator – and so it does at first sight. But one must consider the predicitions of modern theory carefully..

(i) The ‘before’ problem’: according to the modern theory of gravity, classical general relativity (no allowance for quantum), there is no ‘before’ the bang. This is because space and time , matter and energy, all began at a singularity (Hawking /Hartle theorems show unequivocally that relativity implies that an expanding universe began as a singularity). If there is no ‘before’, it’s hard to see how the creator creates. (Don’t forget there is an awful lot of experimental evidence that relativity is correct, if incomplete)

(ii) However, there is a get-out clause – once the universe shrinks within the size of an atom, quantum physics will come into play, and physics simply doesn’t don’t have a good description of what happens to gravity at these scales

(iii) The ‘first-cause’ problem: on the other hand, quantum theory creates it’s own problem for the ‘first-cause’ argument – it is simply not true in quantum physics that everything has a cause. Tiny particles of matter/antimatter routinely spontaneously appear and annihilate without any cause, so long as the time interval is short enough (it’s a consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and there is v strong evidence form particle physics that this effect really exists).

(iv) The ‘something from nothing’ argument: where did all the energy come from? My favourite answer to this is that it didn’t – for all we know, it’s possible the total energy of our universe could add up to zero, if we include the effects of negative potential energy or vacuum energy.

Indeed, putting relativity and quantum together, one has the modern theory that the birth of the universe may have been a quantum fluctuation, inflated to the size of the universe. This idea must must be taken seriously as more and more evidence for inflation is becoming available!In summary, I think I’ll try the tack ‘let’s see how far we can push science without invoking a creator’, and conclude with Hawking’s observation…” God might be like the Queen and parliament – you can have royalty if you like, but it’s not strictly necessary!…”