Does God play dice with the universe? Do events happen by chance? Do we have free will? Was Einstein right in his assessment
of quantum theory?
If you seek answers to such questions, you have come to the right place. In my groundbreaking book God Does Not Play Dice.
The final answers to such crucial questions can surely be achieved, and we can definitely go beyond the uncertainty and confusion that some scientists claim cannot be overcome.
- The final and only solution to the free will problem.
- Why Stephen Hawking is wrong when he says that there is `evidence` that God plays dice.
- The role of memory in solving the free will problem.
- The type of certainty that can be achieved.
- How past, present, and future are interrelated.
- Why key ideas presented by Richard Dawkins and John Allen Paulos are false.
- The reason why much of our worrying is misplaced and irrelevant.
- Why an important pillar of evolutionary theory is based on an incorrect assumption, making Darwinism `defunct`.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author is a native of Massachusetts, USA. He holds an S.B. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served as a Danforth Fellow in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He also has a Master`s degree in Management from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.
He is the author of On the Absence of Disorder in Nature and is working on a book titled Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine: Breaking Through to Higher Consciousness with Jim Morrison and The Doors.
CONTENTS:
Foreword
1. Introduction
2. Beginning the Journey
3. A Certain World Beyond Science
4. The Solution to the Free Will Problem
5. Cracking Nature’s Code of Law and Order
6. Quantum Leaps of Faith
7. Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit Applied
8. Why Darwinism is Defunct
Appendix A
Observations on the Direction of Time
Appendix B
Einstein, God, and the Number One Musketeer
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
Why Darwinism is Defunct
My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend of the knowable world.
That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein, 1927
I suggested earlier that the question of God is ultimately one of knowledge vs. ignorance, not faith vs. reason. Framing the debate as faith vs. reason implies that the two are mutually exclusive, but it is possible to be reasonable and have faith at the same time. In any case, we can move beyond the framework of faith and reason. We can have knowledge of a designer (God, if you will) through the experience of memory I discussed earlier. We can achieve final answers to the free will problem and know with full certainty that we are here by design. There is no need for unsupported faith. Brights such as Dennett (who announced, “‘The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet’ and admit publicly that we ‘don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny?or God’” ) demonstrate a surprising, deep, and downright hilarious ignorance.
I have no contribution to make to the Intelligent Design movement here, but it is worth noting that people such as Gould, Dennett, and Dawkins reject God in large part because some living things don’t seem to have been designed very well. As Gould maintains in discussing orchids, “If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components…. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution?paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.”
Gould rejects God because of what he sees as inferior design in nature. Similarly, James Q. Wilson tells us that “if an intelligent designer had created the human eye, He (or She) made some big mistakes. The eye has a blind spot in the middle that reduces the eye’s capacity to see.” According to Gould and Wilson, if the world were designed by God, things should be more perfect. After all, isn’t perfection an attribute we associate with God? What kind of God would be so stupid, so unintelligent?
Whatever the merits of the above arguments, Gould and Wilson judge the existence of God against their own preconceived notions of beauty and ideal design. God doesn’t measure up to their standard as a designer, so obviously He doesn’t exist. But what if God had intended things to work out this way? What if the odd arrangements and “mistakes” are supposed to be present? What if God wanted to look like a clumsy tinkerer instead of a master craftsman? This is exactly the case, but it is not the heart of my argument, which shares little in common with other anti-Darwinian views. No, my argument against Darwin and his long list of disciples stems from the certain knowledge that the actual is the only possibility.
Let us turn to Dennett again, an unwitting ally of mine. As he has said, if actualism were true, “Darwinism would be defunct, utterly incapable of explaining any of the (apparent) design in the biosphere. It would be as if you wrote a chess-playing computer program that could play one game by rote (say, Alekhine’s moves in the famous Flamberg-Alekhine match in Mannheim in 1914) and, mirabile dictu, it regularly won against all competition! This would be a ‘pre-established harmony’ of miraculous proportions, and would make a mockery of the Darwinian claim to have an explanation of how the ‘winning’ moves have been found.”
Dennett has hit the nail squarely on the head?actualism, which denies CFD, obliterates the idea that evolution could have gone or could go in many different directions. Actualism puts us in the here and now with no ifs, ands, or buts. Actualism demolishes evolutionary biology and vanquishes Dawkins’ idea that the thread of your existence is “wincingly tenuous.” You can wince no more (if you ever did so in the first place). You also might want to knock on wood to confirm that you are alive at this very moment in time. Actualism makes a virtual mockery of the ubiquitous mantras of adaptation, competitive advantage, and emergence, the main lines of argument taken by those who try to explain why things are as they are. (Please blame Dennett, not me, for bringing the words “defunct” and “mockery” into play, although I must confess to having a great fondness for them. They have an unambiguous finality much like Donald Trump’s famous phrase “You’re fired” on The Apprentice. With “defunct” and “mockery,” there is no doubt whatsoever about the infinitely unflattering implications for Darwinian theory. Hey, it’s not my fault that nearly all scientists believe in Darwinism, which is neither scientific nor correct.)
Questions such as “what advantage did the survivors possess that the deceased did not?,” “why did event A occur and not event B?,” and “why is X hardwired into the brain and not Y?,” which are found in endless variations in evolutionary thought, are often irrelevant and beside the point (although the explanations they spawn may be quite interesting as well as fodder for never-ending speculation, and, on occasion, extremely nasty intellectual battles. You know the saying?academic feuds are so vicious because the stakes are so low).
For example, Diamond asks why the Europeans conquered the Incas and not the other way around. His reasons such as geographic luck are entirely logical and seem plausible enough, but in the final analysis, luck had nothing to do with it. Similarly, we are asked by others to consider what would have happened if Hitler, or Alexander the Great, or Newton, or some other major historical figure, had not been born. The answers are, of course, by definition entirely theoretical and academic, although they may be quite imaginative. However, I would contend that such theorizing is essentially futile and meaningless. History occurs by design, and whatever happened could not have occurred otherwise. The past could not have been prevented. The reason things are the way they are is that they are supposed to be this way. I am not going to go so far as Taleb when he suggests that we “need to downgrade ‘soft’ areas such as history and social science to a level slightly above aesthetics and entertainment, like butterfly or coin collecting.” But it is clear that many of our “explanations” of why things took place the way they did, coming from historians and evolutionary biologists alike, resemble what he calls “narrative dependent studies.” Humans seek explanations in order to make sense of the world, but some of our explanations may ultimately prove to be hollow and empty. (See the Notes section for a fuller discussion of Taleb’s extraordinarily important work.)
Many from the anti-God contingent wonder how God could allow evil or suffering. They assume that God is benevolent and should not give us a Hitler (or even a destructive tsunami). When they see suffering, they assume that there is no God. As someone who supports Einstein’s idea of a God who shows Himself in the harmony of natural law (as opposed to a supernatural God who intervenes in the daily lives of humans), I suggest that things have been designed quite nicely. On a human scale, we feel free and believe that it is in our power to confront evil (e.g., stop a Hitler), but afterwards, we can say that we could not have acted otherwise. I am aware that such a view requires us to fundamentally rethink concepts such as responsibility and morality (as well as guilt, shame, and punishment), but this is a secondary matter. Some of us may want more from a designer, but I think the situation is perfectly fine the way it is.
Inscribed at the entrance to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi are the famous words “Know Thyself.” Let me suggest that following the commandment of knowing oneself leads to the use of memory for liberation, which eventually brings us to God. There is an experience available to all of us that allows us to achieve certainty, peace of mind, and final answers. We can know that we are here by design and that our future is already written. We can know that nature is in a state of law and order. We can know that Einstein was right when he said, “God does not play dice.”
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