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Science is about finding useful descriptions of the world; by useful I mean they allow us to make predictions for new experiments, or they quantitatively explain already existing observations. The simpler an explanation, the more useful it is.
However, the God hypothesis has no quantifiable explanatory power. You can’t calculate anything from it. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does make it unscientific.
Physicists currently count four fundamental forces: gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. All other forces we know of—van der Waals forces, friction, muscle forces, and so on—arise from those four fundamental forces.
What is going on? For 97 percent of all Wikipedia articles, if you click on the first link and repeat this in each subsequent article, you will eventually get to an entry about philosophy.
Strange theory!
The past-hypothesis says that the universe started out in a state of low entropy—a state that was very unlikely—and that entropy has gone up ever since. It will continue to increase until the universe has reached the most likely state, in which nothing more will change, on average.
Why don't we get younger?
Throughout our lives, we repurpose atoms that previously belonged to other animals, plants, soil, or bacteria, atoms that were created in the Big Bang or by stellar fusion. A carbon-dating study in 2005 found that the average cell in the adult human body is only seven years old. Though some cells stay with us pretty much our whole life, skin cells are on average replaced every two weeks, and others (like red blood cells) are replaced every couple of months.
Unobservable universes are by definition unnecessary to describe what we observe. Hence, assuming they are real is also unnecessary. Scientific theories should not contain unnecessary assumptions, for if we allow that, we would also have to allow the assumption that a god made the universe. Such superfluous assumptions aren’t wrong. They’re just ascientific. The assumption that the additional universes in the many-worlds interpretation are real is one such ascientific assumption.
I feel encouraged in that because free will itself is an inconsistent idea, as a lot of people wiser than I am have pointed out before. For your will to be free, it shouldn’t be caused by anything else. But if it wasn’t caused by anything—if it’s an “uncaused cause,” as Friedrich Nietzsche put it—then it wasn’t caused by you, regardless of just what you mean by you. As Nietzsche summed it up, it’s “the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far.” I’m with Nietzsche.
compatibilism,
Ways in which free will is possible
The currently known laws of nature contain twenty-six constants. We can’t calculate those constants; we just determine their values by measurement.
But we do not have an empirically supported probability distribution for the constants of nature. And why is that? It’s because (drums, please) they are constant.[*] Saying that the only value we have ever observed is “unlikely” is a scientifically meaningless statement.
So, really, when we are asking whether human behavior is predictable, we should be asking more precisely whether the probabilities of decisions are predictable. Insofar as the current laws of nature are concerned, they are—and to the extent they aren’t predictable, they aren’t under your control.
Are they?
Most hypotheses for the early universe, for example, are just complicated stories that are unnecessary to describe anything we observe. The same goes for attempts to find out why the constants of nature are what they are, or theories that introduce unobservable parallel universes. This isn’t science. It’s religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics.
It isn’t only that I think Stephen Jay Gould got it right when he argued that religion and science are two “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I will go a step further and claim that scientists can learn something from organized religion.
Yet you may ask, “What’s the point?” If the universe is just machinery, a set of differential equations acting on initial conditions, and we are but blips of complexity in an uncaring universe, temporarily self-aware conglomerates of particles that will soon be washed away by entropy increase, then why spend time figuring out just exactly how insignificant our existence is? What’s the meaning of life if there’s no purpose to it?
