1. Understanding Natural Phenomena: Prologue

In the beginning, science did not have a large and strong edifice of knowledge and techniques. But modern science is a force to reckon with. There is a recent book, The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life, by Hawking and Mlodinow (H&M) (2010), which demolishes the God hypothesis quite convincingly. This book even overcomes the vexing first-cause problem. Read it. It takes on, and answers, some of the deepest questions we all think about.

Science does not have all the answers, but the power of the scientific method is such that our answers keep improving with time. In any case, there is no other method for answering any question about Nature.

I summarized this book in an online article. But that is no substitute for the original book.

In a series of posts (one every week) I shall try to explain some salient points made in this book in a simple language. But the question I want to address first is: If scientific explanations are so good, why is it that so many people do not know about them?

This is very tragic. Most people have not learnt even elementary science, leave alone the kind of advanced science needed to answer certain fundamental but difficult questions about our universe. I did not have any difficulty in understanding and enjoying this book because I am a trained physicist and therefore have the basic familiarity with most of the concepts used in H&M's book. But what should be done about people who do not have a background in science?

Writing popular-science books is an obvious solution, but that is easier said than done. Advanced science tends to be very mathematical. On top of that, laws of Nature, for example the laws of quantum mechanics, are highly counter-intuitive. For me this is not difficult to accept. After all, laws of Nature have been there long before we humans came on the scene.  There is no reason to expect that the laws must always be easy for us humans to understand. And yet it is crucial that this important feature of reality be understood and accepted by the public at large. This highlights the importance of bringing up children in an atmosphere in which they appreciate, at a very early age, the essence of the scientific way of interpreting any information or data. I shall dwell on that in the next post.

God, the Failed Hypothesis

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

Karl Popper

The cause-and-effect notion is well-entrenched in the human psyche. Since an effect always follows a cause, and does not precede it, one can go on working backwards, in search of the chain of causes. But this process may never end. There are people who get tired of doing this, and say that ultimately you must postulate or create this thing called God, which must be 'causeless' because we humans do not know how to carry on this quest for causes endlessly.

This amounts to admitting defeat, and not trying hard enough. Modern science is so advanced and sophisticated by now that it can try hard enough, and has an answer; at least a tentative answer (I shall come to this in a future blog).

But the God hypothesis has an emotional angle also, which suits many people. For them, God plays the role of a father figure. A child in trouble looks up to the father (and/or the mother) for solace and support. The world presents a hostile environment, and fearful individuals tend to behave like children, convincing themselves that God will take care of their problems. This is self-delusion, nothing more.

Where is the evidence that there is a God, who has nothing better to do than to take care of the wishes and prayers of all the 'sinners'? There is NO evidence for all this if you investigate things the proper way, namely by following the scientific method. I shall mention two books that explain this:

1. John Allen Paulos (2008): Irreligion:A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up.

2. Victor J. Stenger (2007): God, the Failed Hypothesis.

 

The God hypothesis is not a good one. It 'explains' away everything, but we end up learning nothing. When asked by a student if he believed in God, James D. Watson answered, 'Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand'.

In science there is place only for statements which can be either proved or disproved. Karl Popper coined the term FALSIFIABLE STATEMENTS for them. Pick up any book on religion, and you will inevitably come across statements which are unfalsifiable. How do you carry on a discussion with a person who makes unfalsifiable statements?

Reminds me of a story by H. G. Wells, in which there is a character who is prone to saying 'That's what YOU think!' so frequently in any argument that the other person gives up, in sheer exasperation. My advice is: If a person makes an unfalsifiable statement in your presence, tell him/her: 'That's what YOU think!' Do it a sufficient number of times to get the desired results.

When a statement is falsifiable, it does not matter what you think and what I think. Science is all about falsifiable statements only.

In science there is already a plausible model for our universe which is self-consistent and GODLESS, and which makes only falsifiable statements. Watch this space for more!

The Scientific Method - 2/2

We see things and creatures around us, so we wonder who made them. Till a few centuries ago the scientific method had not been invented, so the edifice of what we now call science did not exist. It does not mean that the people were dumb then. It simply means that their efforts at acquiring knowledge were not of a systematic and concerted nature. By contrast, the power and the beauty of the scientific method is that the knowledge we acquire by applying it is both SELF-CORRECTING and CUMULATIVE. A wrong hypothesis, or a wrongly formulated hypothesis, gets rejected in favour of a better one in the light of experimental evidence. And the better one may, in turn, get superseded by a still better one, and so on.

Moreover, scientists share the results of their research work with other persons in their field of specialization by submitting their work for publication in peer-reviewed journals. The editors of the journals take the opinions of experts ('peers', or 'referees') in that field before deciding whether or not a given piece of research work is worthy of publication. Once published, the information in the research papers becomes available to anybody who reads that journal. Thus, researchers planning new experiments, or proposing new theories, have the benefit of what is already known or experimented upon. There is this famous statement by a prominent scientist that 'so and so was great, but I have the benefit of standing on his shoulders, so I can see farther'.

A few centuries ago, when this way of doing research had not been developed, people still speculated about why things are the way they are, and why they are there at all. A simple-minded approach was to say that there is an almighty, omnipresent God, who has created everything and who runs everything.

But the God hypothesis ran into a lot of problems. For one, if God created everything, who created God? If God has so much knowledge, where did this knowledge come from? I shall discuss this in future posts. Suffice it to say for the time being that the God hypothesis is a bad hypothesis, and an unnecessary hypothesis. It 'explains' away everything, but we end up learning nothing.