Pre-Columbian artifact found at Moundville, 20 miles south of Tuscaloosa.
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The Moundville site is one of the premier centers of the prehistoric Mississippian culture. It is well worth a visit the next time you are in Tuscaloosa.
The plate is evidence that many centuries before DeSoto and Tuscaloosa fought to the death, people in the Tuscaloosa area were addressing the fundamental questions, even if their understanding of basic physics was rudimentary. Science and Religion are clearly closely related. Truth is One. If you pursue any aspect of the truth with diligence you will approach the complete truth. Unfortunately, even if you get to the frontier of physics and astronomy, you are still not guaranteed to recognize the underlying reality. The search for the fundamental truth is a lonely journey and a deeply personal thing. To be even moderately successful involves years of intense contemplation. Therefore, if you are under 21, are highly impressionable, are offended by alien religious sentiments, or become overly agitated by religious discussion, then come back later but click here now. |
The history of science is replete with instances in which phenomena, previously attributed to direct divine intervention, were found to be causally related to physical phenomena at a more fundamental level. Many people have fallaciously attempted to conclude from this that, in the limit, the necessity for an external cause would converge to zero. On the contrary, the basic theorem that leads from physics to religion was known to philosophers in the middle ages and before and its validity is undiminished by the findings of modern physics:
Matter does not contain within itself a sufficient reason to exist.
This can be put in many ways such as: Why is there something instead of nothing? We now have compelling scientific evidence that most of the elementary particles now in existence were also around 10 billion years ago. On the other hand there is no shred of evidence that any of these seemingly stable particles were in existence 20 billion years ago. Some time in the finite past, approximately 14 billion years ago, there was, according to data, a cataclysmic explosion in which the seemingly stable elementary particles we see around us were produced. Of course, even if we lived in an oscillating universe, which now seems scientifically disfavored or in a steady state universe which is contrary to an overwhelming amount of astrophysical data, the fact would be no less clear that the universe does not explain its own existence.
Similarly the forces observed in nature do not have a sufficient reason for their existence or their form. A free field theory of non-interacting particles is just as mathematically self consistent as the Standard Model of modern physics and perhaps more so. Even if one eminently unique string theory could be discovered incorporating all physical observations , there would be no explanation why this theory were realized in nature.
In fact, the Theistic argument has been greatly strengthened by quantum theory. It is now known (Bell's theorem) that the elementary particles do not have within themselves hidden variables that locally determine their subsequent behavior except on a statistical basis*.
As an example, It seems quite likely from grand unification theory that the proton is unstable with a lifetime many orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe. (If current grand unification theory is wrong and the proton is absolutely stable, the same point can be made from other radioactive elements). There is nothing in the proton (or in the radioactive element) that determines whether it will exist one second from now if it exists now. Thus, if the proton is unstable no matter how long its natural lifetime is, there is no guarantee from physical law that any one of us will still be living one second from now. The cause of our continued existence from one second to the next lies outside the laws of physics. We can, of course, take comfort in the statistical knowledge that the probability of any macroscopic object disappearing in the next instant is extremely small. The statistical nature of physics theory seems designed so that we can make sense of physical processes without appearing to restrict the freedom of the Author.
The basic choice that each individual must make is whether to believe that everything has a sufficient cause or to believe that things happen with no cause. To not believe in an infinite external designer, an uncaused-cause, is to believe in meaninglessness and in the absence of ultimate explanations. Since the human brain is hard-wired to require causes, this stance leads rapidly to mental problems unless accompanied by a psychological state suspending fundamental questioning. Many well known scientists have succeeded in functioning in such a state through their entire lives.
Matter does not contain within itself a sufficient reason to exist.
This can be put in many ways such as: Why is there something instead of nothing? We now have compelling scientific evidence that most of the elementary particles now in existence were also around 10 billion years ago. On the other hand there is no shred of evidence that any of these seemingly stable particles were in existence 20 billion years ago. Some time in the finite past, approximately 14 billion years ago, there was, according to data, a cataclysmic explosion in which the seemingly stable elementary particles we see around us were produced. Of course, even if we lived in an oscillating universe, which now seems scientifically disfavored or in a steady state universe which is contrary to an overwhelming amount of astrophysical data, the fact would be no less clear that the universe does not explain its own existence.
Similarly the forces observed in nature do not have a sufficient reason for their existence or their form. A free field theory of non-interacting particles is just as mathematically self consistent as the Standard Model of modern physics and perhaps more so. Even if one eminently unique string theory could be discovered incorporating all physical observations , there would be no explanation why this theory were realized in nature.
In fact, the Theistic argument has been greatly strengthened by quantum theory. It is now known (Bell's theorem) that the elementary particles do not have within themselves hidden variables that locally determine their subsequent behavior except on a statistical basis*.
As an example, It seems quite likely from grand unification theory that the proton is unstable with a lifetime many orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe. (If current grand unification theory is wrong and the proton is absolutely stable, the same point can be made from other radioactive elements). There is nothing in the proton (or in the radioactive element) that determines whether it will exist one second from now if it exists now. Thus, if the proton is unstable no matter how long its natural lifetime is, there is no guarantee from physical law that any one of us will still be living one second from now. The cause of our continued existence from one second to the next lies outside the laws of physics. We can, of course, take comfort in the statistical knowledge that the probability of any macroscopic object disappearing in the next instant is extremely small. The statistical nature of physics theory seems designed so that we can make sense of physical processes without appearing to restrict the freedom of the Author.
The basic choice that each individual must make is whether to believe that everything has a sufficient cause or to believe that things happen with no cause. To not believe in an infinite external designer, an uncaused-cause, is to believe in meaninglessness and in the absence of ultimate explanations. Since the human brain is hard-wired to require causes, this stance leads rapidly to mental problems unless accompanied by a psychological state suspending fundamental questioning. Many well known scientists have succeeded in functioning in such a state through their entire lives.
It has been noted for many years that the laws of physics seem to be strongly fine-tuned to allow the evolution of intelligent human life in the universe. This notion, in various forms, is referred to as the Anthropic Principle. Some interpretations of this fact, which do not appeal to the existence of an intelligent designer, postulate a very large (or infinite) number of spatially or temporally separated universes most of which are inhospitable to life. Then by necessity we find ourselves in one of those universes in which life is possible. Although there is much current discussion in professional physics circles of these scenarios, one might worry that they are outside of the usual physics requirements of testability and that they do not, in any case, address the question of the ultimate why.
* To be precise it is not absolutely excluded that there exists a hidden variable theory provided it is non-local. However, there seems to be no further concerted effort in physics to find such a theory. The structure of the proton is now reasonably well understood in terms of quarks and they also follow the indeterminate rules of quantum mechanics.
If there are any opinions expressed on this page, they are mine and not necessarily those of the University of Alabama.
* To be precise it is not absolutely excluded that there exists a hidden variable theory provided it is non-local. However, there seems to be no further concerted effort in physics to find such a theory. The structure of the proton is now reasonably well understood in terms of quarks and they also follow the indeterminate rules of quantum mechanics.
If there are any opinions expressed on this page, they are mine and not necessarily those of the University of Alabama.
