Category: Science & Technology

I’ve begun reading Stephen Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Delaware. The book is a fascinating account of how modern physics undercuts the basis for philosophical materialism.

I should note that Barr, a Catholic, is not an “Intelligent Design” proponent. In fact, Barr has published a short critique of some aspects of ID theory in First Things. In this book, rather than addressing Intelligent Design theory, Barr discusses classical arguments from design and shows how modern physics presents problems for philosophcial materialists. I’ve only begun reading, but here is a nice quote from the book’s first chapter:

The believing Jew or Christian does not feel the need to be embarrassed when materialists attack religion as ‘anti-scientific’ or irrational. For he regards his own beliefs as not less but far more rational than those of the materialst. He regards them as providing a fuller, more coherent, and more sensible picture of reality. A picture in which the existence of the universe is not merely some colossal accident, in which human life has both purpose and meaning, in which ideas about ruth and falsehood and good and evil are more than chemical responses in our brains, and in which the beauty, harmony, and order of the universe, which science has helped us to see more clearly than ever before, are recognized as the product of a wisdom and a reason that transcends our own.

Stay tuned for more.

There’s an interesting article by Stephen Barr in this month’s First Things, entitled “The Miracle of Evolution,” in response to Cardinal Schonborn’s article The Designs of Science (Barr’s article is in the current issue, so there is no direct link to it yet on the First Things site).

Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Delaware. He also is a Catholic who is critical of intelligent design theory. His judgment about intelligent design theory is stated in his current article: “The Intelligent Design movement’s ‘design hypothesis’ is not a scientific one if we understand natural science to hae its traditional, ‘metaphysically modest’ goal of understanding the ‘natural order’ of the world.”

I’m grading exams and don’t have much time to blog just now, but someone brought a fascinating article in the prestigious mainstream science journal Nature to my attention. The article discusses the anthropic principle and the limits of the scientific method. The anthropic principle, in brief, is that the universe appears to be fine-tuned for life as we know it. As the Nature article observes,

if you believe the equations of the world’s leading cosmologists, the probability that the Universe would turn out this way by chance are infinitesimal — one in a very large number. “It’s like you’re throwing darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10¹²⁰ of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a string theorist based at Stanford University in California. “It’s just stupid.”

Historically, secular physicists and cosmologists have viewed this as “dumb luck.” Recent proposals relating to string theory, however, suggest that our universe may be one of billions of alternate universes, such that the unlikely anthropic coincidence arose essentially inevitably as a result of the law of large numbers. String theory is hotly debated within scientific circles, however, both for substantive reasons (the math, which I would never pretend to understand, apparently is questionable), and because as the theory presently stands, it is not truly testable — in other words, it isn’t “science.”

Nevertheless, because the multiverse theory at least offers a non-supernatural hypothesis for the anthropic principle, some scientists are reluctant to abandon it as non-science. As one scientist interviewed for the Nature article put it, “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science.” In light of the discussions lately surrounding theology and science, this sounds familiar.

Because Nature doesn’t have free articles available for hyperlinking, in the spirit of “fair use” under the Copyright Act, I’m including the full text below.

For those who are interested in faith-science issues, I’d like to promote two great resources I’ve come across. The first is the website of the American Scientific Affiliation. The ASA offers some diverse and welcome perspectives on how to integrate Christian faith and science. There has been interesting chatter on their listserv about intelligent design, including some useful critques and defenses of ID by scientists operating from a faith-based perspective. Their journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith also is detailed and interesting.

The second resource is The New Atlantis, a journal about faith perspectives on technology and society. It’s another thick, thoughtful read for technophiles interested in how Judeo-Christian theology and ethics intersect with biotechnology, computers, the internet, and other emerging technologies in our culture. (Hat tip to Dawn Treader for the link to this journal from his site.)

A new version of iTunes is out that will synch Outlook contacts and calendar entries with the iPod. Cool! Too bad the download files seem to be corrupted. I also noticed this as part of Apple’s blurb for the software:

Smart Shuffle — Adjust random playback to hear what you want.

Well, if you adjust it to hear what you want, it isn’t random, is it?