The story of Joshua

I hardly started reading chapter 5 of Hawking and Mlodinow’s The Grand Design again this afternoon when I noticed something that I must have missed before. The authors talk of story in the Bible where Joshua prays for the sun and moon to stop in their trajectories so he would have extra daylight to finish fighting the Amorites in Canaan. According to the book of Joshua the sun stands still for about a day.

I must say, even if I take into account the couple of years I attended Sunday School as a boy my knowledge of the Bible is certainly not extensive. And, truth be told, it doesn’t much matter for the purpose of this. I’ve always assumed a vague connection between a creator and the planet we live on. It’s been more like “according to the bible God created everything.” Here, we a have Joshua, needing God’s help.

According to Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light: and there was light.

Clearly, God must have not only created the Earth and the heaven, God must have created everything else as well - a God creating every world. Here’s where I show my naivety. Why does Genesis limit God’s reach to earth and not to all earths – all worlds.

The Search for the God particle in Europe

Jack Dikian

December 2011

The Higgs Boson, nicknamed the God particle is the quantum of the theoretical Higgs field expected to have a non-zero vacuum expectation value thus, as the theory goes giving mass to every elementary particle that couples with the Higgs field, including the Higgs boson itself.

Experiments attempting to find the particle are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Now, CERN may have confirmed this theory. Scientists hunting for Higgs boson say they've found "intriguing hints" but not definitive proof that it exists, narrowing down the search and hope to reach a conclusion on whether the particle exists by next year. So if it does exist, it can help explain why there is mass in the universe.

It seems the data indicates the particle itself may have a mass of between roughly 114 and 130 billion electron volts. One billion electron volts is roughly the mass of a proton. The most likely mass of the Higgs boson is around 124 to 126 billion electron volts.

Is our brain hard-wired to believe in God

Jack Dikian

August 2003

Are human beings hard-wired to believe in God. That is, it possible that brain-structure is designed such that the belief in God is to serve as an anxiety reducing function.

The connection between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious feeling has led a Canadian neuroscientist, Dr Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University to attempt and answer if there is a biological and brain basis to some of the concepts that are called the God belief and the God experience.

If the brain basis for the sense of self is tied to language and left hemispheric processes then the right hemispheric equivalent, Persinger believes is a second sense which when experienced is the sense presence or the prototype of the God experience.

One hypotheses is that as we developed an ability to forecast our own self disillusion, and our own death, which generates a great deal of anxiety, the efforts of our brain’s

right temporal lobe is to relieve the anxiety of death - what we sense when we think we are sensing God.

What's Real - Grand Design

Jack Dikian

Thoughts and Comments

The Grand Design

Bantam books 2010

According to one internet based dictionary, “Real” is being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verified existence; not illusory; "real objects"; "real people -not ghosts" etc…

When philosophy is leaned-upon, things become, expectedly a little more murky. Despite the seeming straightforwardness of the realist position, in the history of philosophy there has been continuous debate about what is real. In addition, there has been significant evolution in what is meant by the term "real".

Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism, therefore, also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality.

Model-dependent realism as discussed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book The Grand Design is a scientific method of exploration based on how well a model does at describing the physical reality of the situation. Among scientists, this is not, necessarily a controversial approach. This, however, implies that it is somewhat meaningless to discuss the reality of the situation and, rather, the only meaningful thing you can talk about is the usefulness of the given model. One quote from this book…

"There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science."

The authors seem to have developed a theory familiar to philosophers since the 1980s, namely 'perspectivalism'. Perspectivism is the view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that all ideations take place from particular perspectives.

So according to Hawking and Mlodinow, not only does science fail to provide a single description of reality, they say, there is no theory-independent reality at all. Here, we are told not to expect a unifying theory of everything, rather a set of theories (such as M-theory) that overlap at their boundaries. They argue that the scientific obsession with formulating a single new model may be misplaced, and that by synthesising existing theories we may better provide a picture of unification (my words).

Also, according to the authors, enough is known about M-theory to see that God is not required to answer for the existence of all, instead the existence of a multiverse, à la string theory will suffice.

The authors point out that the laws of nature seem to be tuned incredibly precisely to allow life to exist. Tweak them every so slightly, and there might not even be suns and planets, let alone living things. So the vast majority of those different universes would be uninhabitable.

The author’s argument against divine creation is based on string theory and one associated interpretation, multiverse – however, both strings and multiverse are ideas lacking, obviously, empirical evidence and consistent interpretation.

A thoroughly lucid and accessible book, nicely illustrated and thought provoking.