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St Martin-in-the-Fields,
“Transcendent,”
methodological naturalism:
methodological empiricism—
not that science presumes naturalism; it’s that science has provisionally concluded that naturalism is the best picture of the world we have available.
we find that naturalism gives the best account of the evidence we have,
most people are essentialists about gender, but things are changing.
Poetic naturalism sees things differently. Categories such as “male” and “female” are human inventions—stories we tell because it helps us make sense of our world. The basic stuff of reality is a quantum wave function, or a collection of particles and forces—whatever the fundamental stuff turns out to be. Everything else is an overlay, a vocabulary created by us for particular purposes.
whether a particular way of talking about the world is useful. And usefulness is always relative to some purpose. If we’re being scientists, our goal is to describe and understand what happens in the world, and “useful” means “providing an accurate model of some aspect of reality.” If we’re interested in a person’s health, “useful” might mean “helping us see how to make a person more healthy.”
If we’re discussing ethics and morality, “useful” is closer to “offering a consistent systematization of our impulses about right and wrong.”
One of the most significant features of someone’s ontology is whether or not it includes God. It’s the biggest part of the big picture.
If the likelihood of no evil is larger under theism, then the likelihood of evil is larger under atheism, so evil’s existence increases our credence that atheism is correct.
it’s easy to come up with features of our universe that provide evidence for atheism over theism. Imagine a world in which miracles happened frequently, rather than rarely or not at all. Imagine a world in which all of the religious traditions from around the globe independently came up with precisely the same doctrines and stories about God. Imagine a universe that was relatively small, with just the sun and moon and Earth, no other stars or galaxies. Imagine a world in which religious texts consistently provided specific, true, nonintuitive pieces of scientific information. Imagine a world
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which the relative state of happiness of each person was precisely proportional to their virtue. In any of those worlds, diligent seekers of true ontology would quite rightly take those aspects of reality as evidence for God’s existence. It follows, as the night the d...
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the simple fact that people think about God counts as some evidence that he is real.
Imagine a world with physical matter, but in which life never arose. Or a universe with life, but no consciousness. Or a universe with conscious beings, but ones who found no joy or meaning in their existence. At first glance, the likelihoods of such versions of reality would seem to be higher under atheism than under theism. Much of the task of the rest of this book is to describe how these features are quite likely in a naturalistic worldview.
would rather live in a universe where I am responsible for creating my own values and living up to them the best I can, than in a universe in which God hands them down, and does so in an infuriatingly vague way. This preference might unconsciously bias me against theism. On the other hand, I’m not at all happy that my life will come to an end relatively soon (cosmically speaking), with no hope for continuing on; so that might bias me toward it.
our tiny perch in the cosmos.
what we know about the laws of physics is sufficient to rule out the possibility of true psychic powers.
we have a certain theory of particles and forces, the Core Theory, that seems indisputably accurate within a very wide domain of applicability.
the Core Theory, and the framework of quantum field theory on which it is based—are enough to tell us that there are no psychic powers.
In quantum mechanics, the state of a system is a superposition of all the possible measurement outcomes, known as the “wave function” of the system.
Everett
the “wave function of the universe.”
Many-Worlds Interpretation.
it doesn’t even consist of things like “electrons” and “photons.” It’s just the quantum wave function. Everything else is a convenient way of talking.
both particles and forces arise out of fields.
quantum field theory.
There are two basic kinds of fields and associated particles: bosons and fermions.
standard model of particle
physics,
general rela...
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“what the world is” is a quantum wave function. A wave function is a superposition of configurations of stuff. The next question is “What is the stuff that the wave function is a function of?” The answer, as far as the regime of our everyday life is concerned, is “the fermion and boson fields of the Core Theory.”
the vast majority of life is gravity and electromagnetism pushing around electrons and nuclei.
The laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known.
powerful actually means restrictive— a powerful theory is one in which there are many things that simply cannot happen.
crossing symmetry.
Feynman diagrams.
dark-matter particle
we have a complete inventory of the particles and forces and interactions that are strong enough to have any noticeable effect on anything.
effective field theory.
effective theories
This is why we’re so confident the Core Theory is basically correct in its domain of applicability. Even if there were something utterly different at the microscopic level—not a field theory at all, perhaps not even space or time as we understand them—the emergent effective theory would still be an ordinary field theory.
the emergent phenomena we see in our everyday lives do not depend on dark matter or other new physics. Moreover, they only depend on underlying reality through their dependence on the Core Theory particles and interactions.
some small loopholes in our arguments that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known.
The most likely scenario for future progress is that the Core Theory continues to serve as an extremely good model in its domain of applicability while we push forward to understand the world better at the levels above, below, and to the side.
Could the universe, possibly, simply exist?
What is the best explanation for the existence of the universe?
The scientific question to ask isn’t “What caused the universe?” or “What keeps the universe going?” All we want to know is “Is the existence of the universe compatible with unbroken laws of nature, or do we need to look beyond those laws in order to account for it?”
In classical general relativity, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime; in quantum general relativity—whatever that may be, since nobody has a complete formulation of such a theory as yet—we don’t know whether the universe has a beginning or not.
