Tag Archives: Roger Penrose

Science and God

Why Does Science Work?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Very few people ever think about why science works; they just take it for granted.  Some of the great scientists, however, have wondered about this question.  Philosopher John Lennox, in his book God’s Undertaker, quotes Albert Einstein’s ruminations on the question of why the universe is comprehensible:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery.  Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way . . . the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.  Even if man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori.  That is the ‘miracle’ which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

Einstein is saying that we should expect a chaotic world, a world which cannot be grasped by the mind.  The fact that the world is able to be understood by human minds is a ‘miracle’ that deserves explanation.  In particular, why does physical reality map to mathematics?  Surely this fact demands an accounting.

Lennox notes that Paul Davies finds this mapping to be truly astounding.  Davies comments that much of the mathematics applied to modern science “was worked out as an abstract exercise by pure mathematicians, long before it was applied to the real world.  The original investigations were entirely unconnected with their eventual application.” (emphasis mine) Why?  Surely this is strange.

Lennox continues, “The relationship between mathematics and physics goes very deep and it is very hard to think of it as some random accident.”  Professor of Mathematics Roger Penrose has this to say: “It is hard for me to believe . . . that such superb theories could have arisen merely by some random natural selection of ideas leaving only the good ones as survivors.  The good ones are simply much too good to be the survivors of ideas that have arisen in a random way.  There must be, instead, some deep underlying reason for the accord between mathematics and physics.”

Not wanting to posit an agent behind this mystery, some skeptics will say that science itself explains the accord between math and physics.  But this cannot be so.  Lennox recounts the following words of John Polkinghorne: “Science does not explain the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world, for it is part of science’s founding faith that this is so.”

So why does science work?  Why do math and physics work together so well?  Lennox offers the Christian answer to this question:

The intelligibility of the universe is grounded in the nature of the ultimate rationality of God: both the real world and mathematics are traceable to the Mind of God who created both the universe and the human mind.  It is, therefore, not surprising when the mathematical theories spun by human minds created in the image of God’s Mind, find ready application in a universe whose architect was that same creative Mind.

The non-theist is left with a real quandary.  Without a Mind behind reality, the fact that abstract mathematics directly applies to reality remains a profound mystery.  The non-theist is left, in essence, with blind faith in science.

Atheism, Philosophy

Atheist Physicist Roger Penrose on Reality

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts this morning, Unbelievable?, where the two guests were atheist physicist Roger Penrose and Christian theologian Alister McGrath.  In a fascinating exchange, the host, Justin Brierley, asked Penrose if reality could be reduced to matter.

I expected Penrose to say “yes” and was shocked when he said “no.”  In fact, Penrose said that he tends to divide reality up into three realms: consciousness, the material world, and mathematics.  Penrose, if I understood him correctly, said that these three slices of reality are all intertwined but also distinct from each other.  Penrose seemed to be saying that a reduction of all reality to matter was mistaken.

In fact, Penrose went on to explain that as a physicist, the more he discovers about matter, the more it looks like mathematics!

What is so interesting about Penrose’s comments is that he recognizes that consciousness and mathematics are not explained by the material world, which runs very much counter to the standard atheist dogma.  Mathematics, according to Penrose, seems to exist as an objective reality outside the material world.  He didn’t venture to offer a theory as to where mathematics has come from, but he is clearly disdainful of the materialist reduction program.   How refreshing.

Existence of God

Does the Appearance of Design Prove God's Existence?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Certainly the appearance of design in the natural world makes a strong case for the existence of a super-intelligent being, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Many people look at the world around them and marvel at its functionality and complexity.  A common reaction to the functionality and complexity of the world is to wonder who or what made it that way.

Based on that intuition about the world, theists, those who believe in a single creator God, have made an argument about the existence of God in the following way.

  1. Every design has a designer.
  2. The universe exhibits complex design.
  3. Therefore the universe has a designer.

Premise 1 is fairly straightforward.  If something can be shown to be designed, it must have had a designer.

Premise 2, however, requires evidence.  Below is an extended quotation from William Lane Craig, one of the foremost Christian scholars of our day.

During the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends on a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the big bang itself.  Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe, eventually intelligent life might evolve.  But we now know that our existence is balanced on a knife’s edge.  It seems vastly more probable that a life-prohibiting universe rather than a life-permitting universe such as ours should exist.  The existence of intelligent life depends on a conspiracy of initial conditions that must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable.  For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.  British physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes, at least.  He also estimates that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10,100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the big bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10 to the 123rd power.  There are [many] such quantities and constants present in the big bang that must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it’s not just each quantity that must be finely tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely tuned. Therefore, improbability is added to improbability to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

It is not just the physical conditions that must be present in the universe for life to exist that exhibit complex design.  There is also the issue of life itself.

Living cells are composed of DNA.  DNA consists of nitrogen bases called adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine which are commonly represented by the letters A, T, C and G.  These letters form genetic codes which provide the instructions for the building and replicating of all living things.  The four letter genetic code is identical to any other written language.  The sequences of genetic letters spell out exact instructions just like a sentence in English would.

To give you an idea of how complex life is, a single-celled amoeba contains the equivalent of 1,000 sets of an encyclopedia in its DNA.  The human genome is composed of about three billion nucleotide base pairs.  Years ago, Carl Sagan estimated that there is the equivalent of 20 million books of information stored in the human brain.  This number is considered to be conservative now.  The amount of information contained in living cells and the human brain is truly staggering, and thus the conclusion of complex design seems easily warranted.

Before we move on, I need to quickly add that the evidence presented above of design in the fine tuning of the universe to support life and of the composition of life itself is merely scratching the surface.  Many fantastic books have been written in the past 20 years detailing far more evidence of design in the natural world than what was mentioned above, so hopefully I have just whet your appetite to read more!

But now, if we have shown that the universe is indeed characterized by complex design, then who or what is the designer?

I think we can make the following conclusions about the designer.  The designer is super-intelligent and purposeful.  The intelligence of the designer far surpasses any kind of human intelligence ever seen.  The designer is purposeful because all designs have purposes behind them.  We are not dealing with a being who is randomly creating with no purpose.

Have we arrived at the God of the Bible?  No, we haven’t, but we have certainly made a strong case for the existence of a designer who has at least a couple of the attributes of the God of the Bible, and we have eliminated the possibility that no such designer exists.  We haved ruled out the possibility that the universe is caused by some irrational or purely non-intelligent source.

Theistic arguments for the existence of a Designer confirm the intuition that many people have had since the dawn of man.  To say that everything we see in the world around us just happened by chance is simply unbelievable.