Science, Religion, and Us

In this post, I'm going to offer a lengthier comment on Jim Manzi's post.

I sent the letter below to Jim, and he graciously responded, for which I thank him. I think the main problem I had with his treatment of "randomness" was where he seemed to imply that processes such as mutation and crossing over were pseudo-random, and thus ultimately deterministic. In fact, in all of these, there is at least one component that is random. This is true randomness, and not in any way deterministic.

In our exchange, we were willing to stipulate that these processes incorporated steps that were truly random by any reasonable definition. I won't belabor this point, at least not with him. If you, gentle reader, have any questions, I'll be happy to take them up in another post.

The point Coyne was making, and that Jim Manzi differed over, had to do with the "inevitability" of the development of humanoid intelligence. First of all, I had some problems with the term "humanoid" until I found this definition:

Giberson and Miller assert that the evolution of humans, or something very like them, was inevitable. Given the way that evolution works, they claim, it was certain that the animal kingdom would eventually work its way up to a species that was conscious, highly intelligent, and above all, capable of apprehending and worshipping its creator. This species did not have to look perfectly human, but it did have to have our refined mentality (call it "humanoid"). One of Miller's chapters is even titled "The World That Knew We Were Coming." Giberson notes that "capabilities like vision and intelligence are so valuable to organisms that many, if not most biologists believe they would probably arise under any normal evolutionary process.... So how can evolution be entirely random, if certain sophisticated end points are predictable?"

A "humanoid" intelligence is an intelligence capable of the kinds of reasoning, analysis, and insight we humans are capable of, whether it happens to live in the body of a Vulcan, a Pierson's Puppeteer, or a Mesklinite. In other words, a "humanoid" intelligence is an intelligence a human could, in principle, converse with. (Coyne seems not to consider this aspect of the definition. Later in the article, he appears to get hung up on "humanoid" as meaning "human-shaped" -- like the aliens in most of the Star Trek and Babylon 5 episodes.)

So, are humanoid intelligences inevitable? Giberson thinks a humanoid form of intelligence increases fitness enough that on a life-bearing planet, some creature would develop it sooner or later. It might well be. And to be sure, there are a number of creatures on this planet that have at least some of the rudiments of intelligence. Apes, for example, can recognize themselves in a mirror, which is more than dogs and cats can do.

However, there are lots of different creatures on this planet, and intelligence is pretty rare. For that matter, 99% of all creatures that have ever existed on this planet are extinct. That means at least 100 times the number of different creatures that exist on Earth right now have existed in the past. Of those countless different species, how many have developed a "humanoid" intelligence? As near as we can tell, the answer is one.

And it took some 3 1/2 billion years for that one to arise. Maybe that's the average amount of time it takes. Maybe we were late, and intelligence crops up fairly early. (Maybe intelligence was delayed 65 million years by an asteroid strike.) Or, maybe we were early. If we were too early, planets won't last long enough on average for a humanoid intelligence to arise.

Maybe humanoid intelligence is inevitable, in the same way anything is inevitable, if you try forever.

Coyne is not the only one who points out that we're not inevitable. Stephen Jay Gould raises the same case over and over, pointing out that if we rewound the history of life to the beginning and let it run forward again, there's no reason why any of the creatures we see today would evolve again. I, with my genetic makeup, am improbable almost beyond belief. If you ran history forward from my parents getting together, there's one chance in 70 trillion that I'd have the genetic makeup I wound up with. Similarly, there's no reason why the human species should have evolved from its ape-like ancestors. And there's no reason why mammals should have evolved from reptiles, and so on. The entire history of life could have been completely different.

Is intelligence inevitable? All we know is it developed once.

Coyne also looks at the "fine tuning" argument. "Fine tuning" is basically the argument that if certain aspects of the universe had been just so slightly different, life could not have arisen. Imagining, somehow, that some intelligent entity had access to a set of dials where the physical constants of the universe could be adjusted, this entity adjusted the physical laws of the universe so that life could exist.

Alternative notions are of two basic kinds. First, we have the multiple universes theory, saying that untold numbers of universes have come into being, each with a different set of physical laws. If you allow for the existence of infinite numbers of alternate universes, then there are an infinite number of universes with laws just like the laws in this one.

The other proposition is that the physical laws of the universe don't have as much "elbow room" as the fine-tuning advocates think. The "fine-tuning" argument assumes getting some aspect of the universe just right is a long shot. The fine-tuning argument assumes a wide range around the "right" value, so a randomly-set physical law has lots of room to miss that target. Maybe it's actually missing that's a long shot. Maybe the allowable range is much smaller, and hitting the target is a lot easier.

Ultimately, though, we always have the problem of infinite regress. If it turns out that there's actually no "elbow room", and no other set of physical laws is possible, we can always ask about whatever rules constrained physical laws in that way. Where did those rules come from? Did someone design them, or are they somehow the result of other rules? It seems, no matter how far back you imagine the process going, it seems each step has two choices -- the rules are the result of some earlier rules, or they were designed by some intelligent being. Either there's a designer, or "it's rules all the way down".

Actually, there is a third alternative.

When a designer is invoked, smart alecs will ask who designed the designer. The answer is that the designer is eternal, and needed no beginning. Well, you can say the same thing about the rules. The underlying rules of the universe need not have arisen in the big bang. They could have predated it, and the big bang could have unfolded in perfect accord with those rules.

Now granted, the rules we know about need not be the underlying rules. Cosmology assumes any number of things may have changed as the universe cooled down after the big bang. Maybe the physical constants of the universe arose as the result of laws that exist in the pre-big bang universe, and those laws are eternal.

In this case, the choice is between an eternal, pre-existing creator, and eternal, pre-existing laws. As a scientist, I don't know how to tell which choice is true. As a religionist, I believe, without scientific proof, that there is a creator.

I have no way to prove it, but I'm OK with that.