My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

Several factors led to Positivism. First, the claim that absolute reality can be grounded in evidence is based on a logical fallacy known as the Argument from Ignorance (formally, Argumentum ad Ignorantiam) which can assume both positive and negative forms;

• No evidence has proven statement A to be false. Therefore A is true.
• No evidence has proven statement A to be true. Therefore A is false.

Both statements are fallacious. Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. If it were, science itself could not progress. (Notice that the positive form also allows one to fallaciously “prove” that God does exist). In 1928 physicist Paul Dirac showed that a relativistic formulation of the Schrodinger wave equation led to the prediction of a subatomic particle identical in every respect to the electron except with a positive electrical charge. No such particle had ever been observed, leading to concerns about Dirac’s results and various proposals as to how they could be accounted for. Then, in 1932 Carl D. Anderson confirmed the existence of such a particle and dubbed it the positron. No one seriously believed that positrons didn’t exist prior to 1928. We simply hadn’t come across them yet in theory or practice.

If my friend had lived during the 18th Century and a Christian physicist (like Isaac Newton perhaps) had told him there was a tiny subatomic particle with a mass of 1/1836 that of a hydrogen nucleus that carried a positive electric charge, he would’ve dismissed that claim as false because it had not been “demonstrated to be accurate.”He would’ve been wrong.

Even where theory and evidence are available, “demonstrated to be accurate” can be a slippery claim. Science does not deal in absolute reality. It makes theoretical claims which by nature may gain credence from increasing evidence, but will never be beyond question. Some theories have enjoyed enough support that in practice we treat them as certain (no one seriously disputes Newtonian mechanics). However many have not. Einstein once said of general relativity that no amount of observational would ever prove him right, but a single observation could prove him wrong. In 2007 the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment at Fermilab in Chicago observed transit times for 3 GeV neutrinos that indicated they were travelling significantly faster than the speed of light (Adamson et al., 2007). If confirmed, that would’ve been the one experiment that brought relativity to its knees. Fermilab scientists took these results seriously enough to investigate further, and eventually firmware issues were discovered with the experiment’s detectors that once corrected, restored sub-light neutrino speeds (Fermilab, 2012). The point is that despite a century of observational confirmation, physicists still do not consider the “accuracy” of general relativity so well “demonstrated” that they may dispense with all further research and “just focus on its impact to society.”

In fact, the overwhelming majority of the physical universe cannot be known, even in principle. Our knowledge of its large scale structure and evolution is restricted to observations of the electromagnetic radiation that has reached us along our past light cone (the space-like hypersurface defined by all such radiation that has reached any point of observation at the speed of light), and then only as far back as the last scattering surface (the so-called decoupling era, roughly 379,000 years after the big bang).⁵ Gravity wave detectors such as the Caltech/MIT LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity-wave Observatory) project may one day extend this horizon back to the so-called grand unification epoch where gravity decoupled from other fundamental “gauge” forces (namely, the nuclear strong and electroweak forces) roughly 10-36 seconds after the big bang (Wikipedia, 2014c). The questions most relevant to religion take us back to the actual birth of the universe prior to the so-called Planck time (10-43 seconds after the big bang). Our theories of what happened during this epoch are based on theories of quantum gravity which are not only in their infancy and riddled with inconsistencies, but occur at energy scales that only be tested by constructing a supercollider larger than the solar system and operating it for an extended period. Until someone figures out how to do such a thing, any theories we may dream up to explain the birth of the universe will be unverifiable (Ellis, 2006).

What about the future? Won’t light from distant regions reach us eventually and thus be within our ability to investigate? No. In 1998 it was discovered that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating (Adam et al., 1998; Perlmutter et al., 1999). Thus, in addition to particle and event horizons, the universe has a future horizon (Wikipedia, 2014d). That is, the vast majority of it is constrained not only to regions we cannot see yet, but to ones we will never be able to see… ever. We can still infer what these regions are like based on what we do see, and what our models tell us, but nothing more. And mere inferences are not accurate demonstrations—particularly when they’re based on highly idealized models and observations of the universe’s past that become progressively less reliable the further back we look (Ellis, 2006).

The use of models itself raises issues. Those that best describe the observable universe belong to a class known as Friedmann Lemaître Robertson Walker (FLRW) models. These describe a universe filled with a pressure-free “fluid” that is homogeneous—uniform at every location, and isotropic—uniform in every direction (the two need not be simultaneously true). Clearly this is not the case. Nevertheless, it is close enough to true that these models give us a robust understanding of the universe’s large-scale properties. Even so, it’s too easily forgotten that models are just that—models. They have their limitations, and those limitations must be kept in mind when extrapolating them to sweeping conclusions. Nowhere is this more true than in cosmology—the science that brings us closer to ultimate questions than any other. A great deal of nonsense is glibly preached as though it were sacred truth simply because too many cosmologists cherish their toy models enough to confuse them with reality itself. These days popular science books routinely speak of infinite universes, or an infinite multiverse spawning infinite child universes without realizing that both are based entirely on mathematical idealizations, in some cases even to the point of flatly contradicting the laws of physics.⁶ Yet the authors of these books blissfully ignore such considerations because they’ve become so enamored with the idea of science that they’ve lost sight of how real-world science is actually done. When I was in graduate school my thesis advisor often spoke (ranted actually) about how often experimental physicists like he had to reign in the reckless speculations of ivory-tower theoreticians. He was right.

Notice that in all of this we aren’t talking about mere gaps in the progress of science, but fundamental limitations imposed by the laws of physics themselves. No so-called “god-of-the-gaps” arguments are involved. Unless everything we’ve ever learn about the physical universe over the last millennia gets overturned in the near future, we are permanently constrained by them. Don’t hold your breath!