David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

This is, to be sure, something that Ellis, Kirchner, and Stoeger recognize. At the beginning of their essay, they observe that “the very existence of [the Landscape] is based on an assumed set of laws… which all universes… have in common.” It is only later in their essay that they forget what they have written.

I know just how it is, fellas. I can never remember where I left my keys.

The speed with which a commitment to the Landscape ends in incoherence, while it is alarming, is not unexpected. “Any scientist,” Steven Weinberg writes in defending his endorsement of anthropic reasoning, “must live in a part of the landscape where physical parameters take values suitable for the appearance of life and its evolution into scientists.” To say that portions of the Landscape are “suitable” for the appearance of life is to say that it is there that life is possible. But if life is possible there, it is not possible elsewhere. Human beings could not, presumably, investigate the universe from the interior of the sun. It is too warm and entirely too gassy. If life is not possible elsewhere, then it is necessarily impossible elsewhere. But what might justify this powerful claim if not some physical principle true everywhere ? If a principle about life is general throughout the Landscape, this would seem to make purely local matters of biology supreme matters of physical thought. This assigns to living systems a degree of cosmic importance that only theologians suspected they possessed.

Given issues such as these, it is at least possible to wonder whether the Landscape and the Anthropic Principle are contrivances in just the sense that Ptolemaic epicycles were contrivances. The Landscape has, after all, been brought into existence by assumption. It cannot be observed. It embodies an article of faith, and like so much that is a matter of faith, the Landscape is vulnerable to the sadness of doubt. There are by now thousands of professional papers about the Landscape, and reading even a handful makes for the uneasy conviction that were physicists to stop writing about the place, the Landscape, like Atlantis, would stop existing—just like that.

This cannot be said of the sun.

When physicists come to defend the Landscape, they use language more commonly heard among biologists. Lee Smolin has argued that deep down there is little evidence in favor of string theory, and even less in favor of the Landscape. So, what of it? Leonard Susskind responded: “The level of confidence that string theorists have for their theory is based on a web of interconnected pieces of evidence that is so compelling that genuine mathematicians have no doubt about its validity.”

Sentiments of this sort must be appreciated for their speculative inventiveness, if nothing else. Evidence so compelling that no part of it need be produced is not evidence at all. The thesis that a scientific theory represents a “web of interconnected pieces” describes with some economy of effect the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Or a house of cards.

Very basic physical questions about the Landscape have yet to be answered. On the one hand, there are a very large number of physical theories. They represent a spectrum of possibilities, an immersion into what laws might be true, and what numerical parameters might be in control of things. On the other hand, there are the universes in which they are satisfied, strange, remote, distant, unrecoverable. Physicists very often write as if in the crucible of creation, universes were forever pullulating, red-eyed and throbbing with energy. Perhaps this is so. Who am I to say? But what is left unexplained on these stirring metaphysical accounts is the relationship between those numberless theories and those numberless universes. Just how does a theory get hold of a universe in order to control its birth, formation, and development?

It must do that, because in the end this is just what a theory does, and if it does not do it, then nothing in the Landscape is explained by anything.

But this once again returns the discussion to the point at which it began. If there are such overall principles in charge of the Landscape, why are they true?

Questions such as this reflect in the end a single point of intellectual incoherence. The thesis that there are no absolute truths—is it an absolute truth? If it is, then some truths are absolute after all, and if some are, why not others? If it is not, just why should we pay it any mind, since its claims on our attention will vary according to circumstance?

As a physical claim, the Anthropic Principle hardly seems to enjoy the same authority as the conservation of energy. It is in one sense trivial. We see what we can. But efforts to move the principle from the place in which platitudes congregate have not been entirely successful. Can we really explain the necessities of life by the fact that we are enjoying them? In 1 Kings of the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Elijah, lost in the desert and without food or water, sat underneath a juniper tree and waited for death. An angel appeared, offering him refreshment. What Elijah took, he of course needed, and since he needed what he took, what he took was sufficient to account for his survival. Biblical commentators have wisely refrained from explaining the angel’s appearance on these grounds. The angel, they observed, was sent to Elijah by God. That is the proper explanation for its appearance. No matter the extent to which we need the laws and parameters of the physical world to be as they are, that by itself cannot explain the fact that they are as they are.

It is odd that men who as a group are united by their conviction that religious beliefs are very primitive should find themselves disputing matters more commonly discussed in the Alpha Phi Alpha keg room. It is so nonetheless, a point that the brothers find hardly surprising. Discussions on various Internet postings are endless. Often they contain an eerie mixture of technical sophistication and philosophical incompetence. Or the other way around. The willingness of physical scientists to explore such strategies in thought might suggest to a perceptive psychoanalyst a desire not so much to discover a new idea as to avoid an old one.

Such things happen. And they happen even in mathematical physics.

Received wisdom has it that lacking access to the mysteries of science, men and women accept instead the mysteries of faith. This diagnosis is very often expressed in terms of evolutionary theory. The human brain is an instrument shaped by selection for survival, and it is only natural, considering the problems they faced many years ago, that anxious men and women should have turned toward elaborate theological speculation. What better hedge against fearsome predators or an uncertain food supply than the Immaculate Conception or the revelations of the Gematria ? As general relativity or quantum field theory become more widely known, human gullibility will decline.

This is not a view of things that a close study of string theory, the Landscape, or the Anthropic Principle tends to support.

Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil Turok: “What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws.”

Turok was surprised by the question; he recognized its force. Something seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature, and what makes this observation odd is just that neither compulsion nor obedience are physical ideas.