“The evidence is pretty incontrovertible that he doesn’t exist”:

[rug]

Stephen Colbert’s favorite scientist on the universe, naturalism and finding meaning without God



by Sean M. Carroll
Release Date: May 10, 2016

Sean Carroll excels at explaining complex science to regular people -- including those who don't believe

PHIL TORRES
SUNDAY, MAY 8, 2016 02:00 PM EDT

More than two decades ago, the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan wrote that “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.” Unfortunately, Sagan’s warning remains as true today as ever: American culture is deeply infused with an anti-intellectual distrust of scientific knowledge, a failure to understand the nature of peer-review, and an unwavering predilection for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

In some cases, scientific illiteracy is nothing more than an occasion for chuckling, such as when the rapper B.o.B insisted that Earth is flat rather than an “oblate spheroid,” prompting a “mic drop” response from the famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But in many other cases, the consequences of ignorance about reality are very real. The most salient instance of this concerns the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change. According to a recent paper published in Nature, the policies we implement in the next few decades will determine the habitability of our planet for the next 10,000 years. The stakes really are high today — higher than ever before — and the fact that many public leaders fail to understand the urgency and causes of climate change, not to mention the difference between ions and eons, as Sarah Palin demonstrates in a tweet from 2009, is reason for genuine anxiety about the future of humanity.

Aside from the existential importance of understanding science, there’s also a purely aesthetic issue. The scientific worldview offers, I would argue, a far richer and more elegant picture of the cosmos than any ancient myth or grand narrative conjured up by the human imagination during the Iron Age. As Charles Darwin would put it, there is grandeur in this view of the universe. And he’s right. Consider a few nuggets of mind-boggling truths, courtesy of science’s ongoing investigation into the arcana of reality: the cosmos has no center and no boundaries. The fastest moving organism travels more than half the speed of sound — and it’s a plant. You very likely have some DNA from an ancient Neanderthal in your cells. Earth rotated faster when the dinosaurs were alive, meaning that the days used to be shorter. The universe is, in other words, an endless playground for curious minds.

Sean Carroll is one of the few scientists today who excels at conveying complex ideas in simple — but not simplistic — terms to the public. A cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), his work focuses on dark matter and general relativity. You may have seen him discussing these topics on The Colbert Report or in Through the Wormhole, a documentary series hosted by Morgan Freeman. Dr. Carroll is also a vocal atheist who’s debated Christian apologists such as Dinesh D’Souza and William Lane Craig. His new book, The Big Picture, explores a wide range of fascinating topics, from the submicroscopic components of the universe to whether human existence can have meaning without God — and everything in-between. It’s a tour de force that offers a comprehensive snapshot of the human situation in our infinitely strange universe, and it does this with highly accessible language and engaging storytelling.

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/08/the_evidence_is_pretty_incontrovertible_that_he_doesnt_exist_stephen_colberts_favorite_scientist_on_the_universe_naturalism_and_finding_meaning_without_god/

[MisterP]

1. "a far richer and more elegant picture of the cosmos"? the second decan-spirit of Taurus

seems rather unimpressed with plant growth or tidal drag

[rug]

2. That elegance also describes a cosmos inhospitable to life in all but the rarest circumstance.

It's the awe of the unconscious.

[MisterP]

3. frankly calling the cosmos friendly, hostile, or indifferent are all startlingly anthropomorphic

if it's supposed to be dead unfeeling lifeless matter it's highly suspect--why all this obsession about what the cosmos isn't thinking about us? nobody agonizes this much about our place in the grand scheme of toast or drywall

if OTOH it's supposed to be purposive or emergent then that's just watered-down pantheism, trying to swap an infinite Godhead with something that's merely very, very big

[rug]

4. Hostile in the same sense that gamma rays are inhospitable to life.

It's difficult to find any word that is not anthropomorphic to one degree or another. Even "dead" implies a prior life. But that will do as a descriptor of the universe.

[MisterP]

5. hence the Gordian knot--the universe is extremely amenable to life

with rings within rings of galactic and stellar habitable zones, and extremely hostile to it with life reduced to a thin crust on one out of 9 planets

so why, then, are we so hung up on "is the universe hostile or friendly?" to me it seems like a very strange question to ask

[rug]

6. If it was amenable there would be more life.

What I find odd is a reaction to such an entity, no matter how vast, complex and powerful, that is one primarily of awe or grandeur.

"Wow, we're screwed!" Along with anything we've ever known or loved. "But it's such a wonder!"

I understand the reaction but it remains to me quite odd.

[MisterP]

7. right--I was awkwardly fumbling at the question of "why do we care so much?"

why are we even positing these questions of habitability and wonderment?

these sorts of books never hit me like they hit other people--I'm no Paleyite, so what does the sense of wonder invoked by stratigraphy or particle physics have to do with Deity? with mountains or nebulae or clever science writing I merely feel the appropriate level of awe and curiosity, it stays with me, but the idea of making social or theological arguments off of it is quite alien: they go "Earth's so little in the scheme of the universe, we really should stop having wars" and I'm all "the Earth's definitely a precious Blue Marble, but 57,510,000 sq mi's plenty big for warfare: interstellar distances have no bearing on this"

there's the usual pop scientist's fussing about how we're about to tumble into the abyss of Flat-Earthism and Bigfoot and global warming, but in fact the skeptic movement is pretty loaded with AGW denialists and their language is much as often technocratic as it is "only God can make the Earth warmer" (the fact that this is rather highly unsubstantiated by Scripture is never brought up even though it'd be quite a clincher); they've been battling the Gohmerts and Volivas of the world so long that they think a little more science in junior high will cure all our problems

so both Carroll's vague epistemology and the importance he gives to the aesthetics of Neanderthal DNA or the lack of a center to the universe stem from 1. a category error that sees religion as a protoscience, as a way of explaining everything in the physical world and 2. the idea that science therefore rolls back religion (much as the Cold Warriors panicked that each revolution or sign of independence was America losing and the Russkies winning)

right now meaningfulness and morality are just being crudely stapled onto matter, no matter how riddled with "emergent properties": it's cutting a Gordian knot with a butter knife and declaring yourself ruler of Anatolia

The trick here is “true” meaning. My life has meaning without any supernatural guidance, no matter what anyone else might say about it. The meanings that we finite human beings attribute to our lives are the only kinds of true meanings, because those are the only kinds of meanings there are.

In my view, the fact that life is temporary is precisely what does give it value. Why should we care about a century-long existence if it was followed by an infinitely-long span of additional existence? We are fragile, ephemeral, finite creatures, bringing meaning to the world around us through our understanding and our care. Our lives have meaning exactly because they are all we have, and therefore are infinitely precious to us.

what have actual Buddhists/Christians/nihilists/existentialists have said about the issue? and, more importantly, how does their theology (lacking the fundies' God of the Gaps) falter?

[rug]

8. I like Carroll and I expect I'll like this book.

The arguments and conclusions are interesting to contemplate - and I expect I'll hear some lucid scientific explanations along the way.

Salon's headline is - again - misleading and sensational. The problem I've found with books like this, particularly those of Krausss, is they tend to make completely unsupported leaps into areas which they can not possibly have an answer.

One reason I like Carroll is he admits as much, as he did in this interview:

So a better question is: what does our best understanding of the laws of physics tell us about the origin of the universe, and why it might exist at all? The answer is “not much.” This is a case where we have to be humble. The universe might have had a beginning, or it might have existed forever, we just don’t know. There’s certainly no reason to think that there was something that “caused” it; the universe can just be.