Square Pegs and Round Holes
An Evaluation of the Science in The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom by Gerald L. Schroeder New York: The Free Press, 1997, $25.00, ISBN: 0-684-83736-6 Peter B. Weichman The thesis of The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder is that, if interpreted properly, the book of Genesis is in literal agreement with the discoveries of modern science in the areas of cosmology, evolution, and human history. This book is refreshing in that it does not question or evade expert scientific consensus on any topic in these areas. It does not doubt the 10-20 billion year age of the universe nor the fact of human evolution. Rather, using a Talmudic-style analysis of shades of meaning in the original Hebrew wording of the biblical text (distinguishing, for example, between “creation’’ which requires the direct hand of God, and “making’’ which allows God’s will to be carried out through the laws of nature), and modern interpretation of the thinking of centuries-old biblical scholars, the author attempts to bring consistency between these facts, the literal six days of biblical creation, and the lives Adam, Eve, and their descendants. In places the book succeeds in making a reasonable case for consistency between biblical text and scientific fact. In other places the author stretches biblical interpretation to the breaking point to obtain such consistency. In still other places the author commits significant mathematical errors that lead one to question his entire thesis. A common strategy in the book is to use gaps in present scientific understanding of the mechanisms of the evolution of the early universe and of life on earth, especially the incredible fine-tuning of the former and the surprisingly rapid pace of the latter, to “open the door’’ for the possibility of divine direction. Thus, for the most part, the book follows the dictates of established, peer-reviewed scientific research and understanding, but veers into a religious interpretation of the yet-to-be-filled gaps between these dictates. There are, however, also places where one finds what seems to be deliberate obfuscation of modern scientific knowledge to create mysteries where none exist. The Six Days of Creation Conventional biblical scholarship generally posits two interpretations: (1) the literal point of view, in which creation took six 24-hour days, the present universe is only about 6,000 years old, and all scientific evidence to the contrary is misguided; (2) the parable point of view, in which biblical days are taken as poetic representatives of much longer periods of time. Gerald Schroeder melds these two viewpoints by proposing that, in effect, the bible is telling the story of creation from two entirely different viewpoints. The six days of creation are being described from a viewpoint in which time is literally passing much more slowly than on present day earth, while biblical human history, which begins with the story of Adam and Eve, is described from an earthly perspective. It is well known from Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity that time runs at different rates depending on how fast one is traveling and how strong a gravitational field one is experiencing. For example (roughly speaking), time runs more slowly if one travels close to the speed of light or if one orbits close to a very massive dense object. A clock aboard a spaceship moving near light speed, or orbiting very close to a black hole, could conceivably record the passage of six 24-hour days while the rest of the universe experiences billions of years. This simple observation, however, is inadequate for theistic scientists like Schroeder, without a more convincing argument, i.e., a biblically-based interpretation of where one should place the clock. Here the author appeals to a universal clock—one defined by the universe as a whole rather than any particular place in it—which he derives from the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). The CBR, a Nobel Prize-winning discovery by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965, presently has a temperature of about 3 degrees Celsius [KELVIN?] above absolute zero, and is left over from when the universe first formed out of the Big Bang. In the early universe this radiation was much hotter, but cooled as the universe expanded. This expansion is also accompanied by a stretching of the average wavelength of this radiation. Schroeder proposes to use this wavelength as a universal measure of the perceived rate of passage of time, which I will call CBR time. In order to translate 15 billion years into six days one then merely needs to view the evolution of the universe from a time, which I will call Genesis time, when this wavelength was a several trillion times shorter! One further step in the argument is required. At the precise instant of the Big Bang this wavelength was infinitely short. The proper viewpoint cannot then be from the instant of creation, but must be from a fraction of a second later. The author uses biblical wording and the writings of the 13th-century biblical scholar Nahmanides to argue that the proper instant of time is when matter first began to form out of the extraordinarily hot soup of elementary particles created by the Big Bang. Thus, just as fog condenses out of humid air as it cools through a well-defined temperature, the building blocks of matter (protons, neutrons and electrons) condensed out of this soup at a well-defined quark confinement temperature. It is known from modern high-energy physics experiments at the largest accelerators in the world that this temperature corresponds to a time (about 10 microseconds after the Big Bang) when the CBR wavelength was 4 trillion times shorter than it is today! Schroeder concludes, then, that the biblical creation story is being told from a viewpoint in which the six 24-hour days are measured by “a universal clock tuned to the cosmic radiation at the moment when matter formed’’ (p. 58). This is Genesis time. The science content of this argument is sound, but there are several problems with it that the author fails to address. One is philosophical: why should the passage of time be measured against a single instant? The author has gone to the trouble of defining universal CBR time, but then fails to stick with it. A far more natural way of describing the evolution of the universe, used by present day cosmologists, is in terms of the natural flow of universal CBR time from epoch to epoch. Unfortunately this brings us back to the usual 10-20 billion year age of the universe and a failure of any literal interpretation of Genesis scripture. The author alludes to a problem similar to this (footnote on p. 51), and answers it by taking the point of view that he is trying to understand the Bible as it is, not rewrite it. Unfortunately this begs the question: is he stretching the bounds of logic to find an explanation that fits the literal story of creation? There comes a point where the logic becomes so unnaturally stretched that one should seek some other explanation. Other problems are quantitative: the age of the universe is known only to within a factor of two. Similarly, the experimentally determined temperature of the quark confinement transition is known only approximately. This means that, even if we accept the author’s logic, rather than precisely six days of creation modern science can only tell us that there were anywhere from three to 10 days of creation. If the author’s calculation does not converge on precisely six days as scientific uncertainty in these two values decreases with future observations, he will have to reconsider his arguments. In addition, one is not bound to interpret the quark confinement transition as the instant when matter was formed. A more likely candidate, in my mind, is when atoms begin to form, i.e., the time of charge confinement (that occurred some time later). Unfortunately this would yield creation times many orders of magnitude longer than the required six days. One is again left with balancing the stretch of the authors arguments against the necessity for seeking other interpretations. In Chapter 4, the author attempts to add more detail to his argument by computing the creation day by creation day passage of earth-based time (table on p. 60), and claiming that the biblically described events correspond remarkably with scientific-based timing of these same events. Unfortunately, as I will explain, the author’s calculations are completely incorrect and negate his entire thesis. The author uses an exponential decay formula based on the idea that the rate of Genesis time passage relative to CBR time passage halves during each creation day. The author makes an erroneous claim that Genesis chooses the natural logarithm for this purpose. If this were the case the relative rate would decrease by a factor e = 2.718287 after each day, not by a factor of 2. To make matters worse, the author’s explanation of where this formula comes from is also erroneous. He argues correctly that as the universe expanded, its CBR clock became ever more similar to that of present day earth. He also says correctly that the time taken for the universe to double in size increases exponentially as its size increases (i.e., as it continues to expand). Unfortunately, he then argues incorrectly that this means that each subsequent Genesis day spans an exponentially decreasing earth time. There are two major problems with this. First, according to his own arguments in the previous chapter, exactly the opposite is true: as the universe expands, CBR time passes ever more rapidly relative to Genesis time (the average CBR wavelength continues to increase relative to that at quark confinement time). Thus, by this argument, each Genesis day should span an exponentially increasing CBR time. Second, size-doubling is also an exponential increase, so the fact that exponential size increase corresponds to exponential time increase actually means that the size of the universe increases as a power law in time. Correspondingly, the rate of passage of CBR time increases as a power law relative to that of Genesis time. This is actually an oversimplified description, but corresponds roughly to what modern science infers from theories of the time rate of change of the Hubble constant (see any elementary book on cosmology). Ironically, the fourth column [labeled “Blueshift (z+1)’’] in the Table on p. 60, which lists the ratio of CBR time to Genesis time, corroborates my argument: the numbers increase gradually even as the numbers in the third column, listing the net passage of CBR time per Genesis day, decrease exponentially. How the author could miss this obvious contradiction is unclear. If one now puts in the correct numbers in the Table on p. 60 one obtains results which utterly demolish the author’s claims of correspondence between Genesis and archaeological data (Table on p. 67). For example, the first day comprises a relatively short half-billion years, the second day comprises about 1.5 billion years, and the last four days are basically uniformly spaced, comprising about 3.5 billion years each. The Table on p. 67 would then have, for example, water appearing on earth 10-14 billion years ago and the first land animals appearing 3.5 billion years ago. This grossly contradicts the author’s own time estimates for these events based on archaeological data. The mathematics of Schroeder does not match his science of God. The Evolution of Life and the Universe It has become clear over the past few decades that there is far more to evolution than Darwin ever dreamed. The fact of evolution, namely descent with modification from lower to higher order forms of life over billions of years, must be distinguished from the theory of evolution, namely human understanding of precisely how evolution occurs. The fact of evolution is as scientifically well-established as the fact that the moon orbits the earth. Many aspects of the theory of evolution, by contrast, are still under debate today. The fact that the moon orbits the earth has been known since ancient times: the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians knew it. Empirical rules for how it does so emerged with Kepler. A true quantitative theory of how and why it does so had to await the genius of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. A fundamental understanding of the workings of gravity itself had to await Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The theory of evolution (in my admittedly chauvinistic view as a physicist!) sits now about where the theory of the moon’s orbit sat at the time of Kepler. We understand its empirical rules: what we are is controlled by the genes that make up our DNA. Our DNA is passed down to us as a mixture of that of our parents. Bad mixtures were a detriment to survival and were rapidly winnowed out. Good mixtures led to superior survival traits and were passed on to future generations. This natural selection may explain optimal adaptability of pre-existing traits to the ambient environment (such as the rapid build-up of germs resistance to antibiotics), but some think that this may not explain the spontaneous appearance of entirely new traits and new species. The latter requires changes in the structure of the DNA molecule itself. We understand the chemical reactions that allow DNA to divide and replicate. We understand that this process is not perfect and that mistakes can be made, either in the chemical reaction itself, or through a subsequent bombardment, say, by cosmic rays. Such mutations could sometimes give rise to an improved organism, and the process of natural selection could then ensure that this improvement gradually diffuses through the entire population. A sufficient number of mutations could produce an entirely new species. Some scientists think that the mutation process may be far too slow. Simple models of sequences of random mutations with the most optimistic of assumptions seem to require orders of magnitude longer than the observed four billion years for human life to emerge from a random chemical soup. Schroeder proposes that this vast discrepancy opens the door for divine guidance. Perhaps, but the gap between Kepler and Newton should give one pause in this interpretation. Divine intervention in the motion of heavenly bodies, which seems unnecessary today, would have been a natural proposal to fill the gap in Kepler’s model. Unfortunately, biological processes are much less regular and much harder to control than physical processes. We cannot travel backwards in time to fill the gaps in the fossil record. We cannot repeat the process of, say, the evolution of mammals in a human lifetime: it is difficult to imagine controlled experiments on a large population of animals over thousands of generations when the average research grant runs only a few years. Small scale evolutionary trends can be observed in microbes and insects, and computer generated evolutionary sequences can be modeled on relatively simple organisms, but we have yet to observe the sort of observational evidence that would satisfy some evolution skeptics. This is not to say that there are no provocative ideas out there for how nature might speed up evolution. Stuart Kaufmann’s theory of “life at the edge of chaos” (see his 1993 book The Origins of Order), in which evolution is likened to a rocky slope constantly driven through a series of avalanches, comes to mind. Unfortunately the gap between these ideas and experimental verification is not insignificant. What seems clear is that mutations cannot be considered as isolated independent events. DNA replication is a complicated dynamic process that presumably involves the interactions of many genes in some collective fashion. Examples of collective patterns arising out of simple microscopic interactions abound in physics: hurricanes and thunderstorms emerge from the interaction of air, water and heat; complex crystals emerge from a molten slag of minerals; superconductivity emerges from an interplay of sound and electricity. The very process of life, reproduction, and growth itself demonstrates the complexity of what can emerge from what is at heart a complicated dance of atoms. There is no reason why evolution should not exhibit similar complexity. Our gaps in the scientific understanding of the cosmological evolution of the universe are smaller than those of biological evolution. They are mainly restricted to questions of what “caused’’ the Big Bang, and how to think about what was there “before’’ the Big Bang. Here too there are provocative ideas—Stephen Hawking’s theory of the wavefunction of the universe, for example—but these are, at present, impossible to test. Schroeder also cites the problem of fine tuning: only very slight changes in the fundamental constants of nature would apparently have given rise to a universe that could never have supported life. What is it that selected our own universe’s “correct’’ values for these constants? Here Schroeder proposes that the door is open for divine guidance. The problem is that we do not understand well enough the origin of the constants of nature to know if there really is a problem. One cannot speak of the likelihood or unlikelihood of the present universe if one does not understand the range of universes that the laws of nature permit. Inflationary cosmology—many universes may have come and gone, and only in ones with this particular configuration of laws did intelligent life evolve—is giving us some clues to this mystery, but it too remains untested. The history of science is filled with mysteries that eventually were solved. It is much too early to decide whether or not the remaining mysteries of biology and cosmology will similarly fall before the scythe of scientific investigation. The Story of Adam and Eve If the six days of creation unfold in Genesis time, and the remainder of the Bible unfolds in time as we now perceive it, we are left with the problem of how Adam and Eve, living less than 6,000 years ago, could have been the first humans when the archaeological record clearly shows the evolution of humans over hundreds of thousands of years. Schroeder resolves this paradox in a very interesting way (chapter 9). By careful interpretation of the Hebrew scripture he concludes that the Bible does not rule out pre-Adam humans because they were not human. He argues that Adam and Eve were the first humans through the infusion of God’s spirit or “neshama.’’ Thus pre-Adam humans lacked the neshama that distinguishes them from post-Adam humans. What is there in the historical record to mark Man’s sudden acquisition of humanity? Schroeder cites the beginning of writing and the growth of larger cities approximately 6,000 years ago. These are signs, he says, of a human “spirituality that transcends the individual’’ (p. 144). This strikes me as rather arbitrary. There have been equally large leaps in human progress at many times throughout history: the first use of stone tools, the control of fire, the domestication of animals, the invention of agriculture, the creation of the wheel, the invention of writing, and even spirituality itself, i.e., religious belief in higher powers. These all predate 4,000 B.C. by significant amounts. Skeptic editor Michael Shermer has even voted Newton’s Principia as the single greatest human intellectual achievement of all time (Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 79), which might then be argued to place human creation at A.D. 1687! Another problem is that archeological evidence places humans all over the world at Schroeder’s time of God-inspired humanity. It is not possible that descendants of a single pair of individuals in Mesopotamia could repopulate the entire world in the allotted time. Native Americans, for example, are believed to have been cut off from the Asian continent for at least 12,000 years and therefore could not possibly be descendants of Adam and Eve (unless Schroeder wants to argue, which I seriously doubt he would, that Amerindians are not humans). To make matters worse, Schroeder takes literally the enormous near-millennial life spans listed for the early descendants of Adam and Eve. Even granting his arguments for the biological possibility of living 700 or 800 years, I find it very difficult to believe that there would be no archaeological evidence for such incredible life spans. Ancient writings record the birth and death of kings throughout biblical times. I am not aware of evidence that any of them lived longer than a modern day life span (and certainly, on average, much shorter). An order of magnitude decrease in the human life span since biblical times also flies in the face of the tendency of the modern trend toward longer human lifetimes. Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, and Free Will In Chapter 10 Schroeder turns to more philosophical discussions of human free will and an all powerful, all knowing Creator. He cites the inherent probabilistic nature of the laws of quantum mechanics as the death of complete determinism and the origin of free will. Although the discussion of the nature of quantum mechanics is accurate, it has not been shown that its indeterminism plays a measurable role in the operation of the human brain. Modern physics experiments demonstrate that quantum indeterminism is something that appears only under very special conditions, for example at very low temperatures in very small isolated systems. At biological temperatures in biological materials quantum indeterminism is completely swamped by classical indeterminism: the chaotic entropy of the myriad thermally fluctuating heat, matter, and electromagnetic fields surrounding and impinging upon the human body. Appeals to quantum mechanics are simply unnecessary to provide a scientific basis for free will. The author attempts to place the idea of an all knowing God on a scientific basis by appealing once again to the idea of relativistic time dilation. If the mind of God were to travel at the speed of light it would experience all events in the universe simultaneously, and would therefore know everything instantaneously. Unfortunately this argument does not solve the problem: time dilation does not allow violations of causality. Experiencing time faster neither implies knowledge of the future nor allows transference of knowledge from the future to the past, i.e., time travel. Running a movie on fast forward allows one to experience it more quickly, but still does not give away the ending before it happens. The mind of God traveling at the speed of light would experience the life of the universe in one great burst, but after the burst the universe is gone and God’s only choice would be to begin creation anew. The Wisdom of Energy In the final chapter (chapter 12) of the book Schroeder pulls together a hodgepodge of arguments to support his thesis. In doing so his quality control drops precipitously. He proposes that the writings of Nahmanides may be interpreted in terms of Einstein’s E=mc2, i.e., the equivalence of matter and energy. Unfortunately the amount of energy required to create matter is enormous. The energy density in the early universe would have been equally enormous and would never be described as “so thin it had no corporeality’’ (p. 177). He goes on to propose that “wisdom is the unifying base of energy’’ (p. 178) and that “the laws of nature are understood as a projected manifestation of an infinite wisdom that transcends the physical universe, within which the physical universe dwells, and of which the physical universe is composed’’ (p. 178). Somehow “the information explosion that we are experiencing’’ (p. 178) is supposed to someday provide a scientific basis for this view. These scientifically meaningless thoughts are more characteristic of the ramblings of a New Age mystic than the careful pronouncements of a sober scientist. Schroeder discusses the apparent exponential distribution of the planets—each planet being approximately twice as far from the sun as the previous one—except that the earth seems to be stuck in where no planet should be. This is taken as another sign of divine influence. Unfortunately this is an example of seeking a pattern where none exists. The exponential distribution is obeyed only if one discounts Neptune and Pluto and counts the asteroid belt as a planet. Thus only by throwing out three planets and adding one where none exists does the pattern emerge. Scientist massaging their data to t his extent would not be taken seriously. The author also seems to find significance in the mysterious link between mass and gravity. Why does he consider this any more mysterious than any other link, such as that between charge and electrical forces, or of that between quark color and nuclear forces? Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Maxwell’s equations, and Quantum Chromodynamics, respectively, provide beautiful quantitative descriptions of these phenomena. The author makes no mention of this and therefore leaves me baffled as to where he thinks the remaining mystery lies. Schroeder wonders about the mysteries of radioactive decay, considering whether a group of decaying atoms communicates within itself in order to decide which half of them should decay and which half should not during each half life. This is probably the most elementary scientific gaff in the book and makes me wonder if the author isn’t deliberately trying to bamboozle the non-technical reader. An analogy is appropriate. Imagine a group of people in a room. Each has a coin that he or she flips once per minute. The rule of the game is that if the coin comes up “heads’’ the person must leave the room. After the first flip roughly half the coins will come up tails and roughly half the people will then leave the room. After the second flip roughly half of the remaining coins will come up tails and roughly half of the remaining people will leave the room. And so on. The population in the room therefore drops by roughly half after each minute. Each person need communicate only with his or her coin and need not even be aware that there is anyone else in the room. The “mystery’’ of the one-minute half life is explained by the most elementary probability theory. The only question remaining is the connection between coin flips and radioactivity. The answer is provided by the same indeterminism of quantum mechanics that the author used in his discussion of free will. The internal dynamics of radioactive atoms, as described quantitatively by Schrödinger’s equation, effectively determines the rate at which the internal coin is being flipped in terms of its internal atomic and nuclear structure, allowing quantitative predictions of precisely what the half life is. More detailed explanations may be found in any elementary book on quantum mechanics. Grasping at the latest theories in science, Schroeder claims connections between Jewish mysticism (the Kabalah) and modern string theory. Aside from the fact that string theory is at present a purely mathematical construct without a single experimentally verifiable prediction, playing number games with the Hebrew letters of the Bible is hardly in the same league with advanced theoretical physics and mathematics. Mystical pronouncements about how answers to the mysteries of gravity and life may lie within 22 hidden dimensions of the world are inconsistent both with modern string theory and with biochemistry. The author cites a host of (unspecified) scientific experiments whose results require five or more dimensions to explain. I am unfortunately unaware of any such experiments. If one existed it would be an immediate candidate for a Nobel prize and word of it surely would have leaked into the physics literature. Revelation I came away from reading this book with very mixed feelings. I have had some exposure to Talmudic scholarship over the years and rather enjoy the way in which it is used to find order in apparently inconsistent or contradictory biblical passages, while staying within the (admittedly rather loose) bounds of logical inference. Much of Schroeder’s book is an enjoyable mix of popular science and Talmudic style contortions to bring literal agreement between Genesis and modern science, but I take exception to his attempts to create knowledge gaps where none exist, and to his failure to point out the gaps created by his own arguments when followed to their logical conclusion. Proposing a solution that satisfies one set of requirements while failing to mention the myriad other requirements that the solution fails to satisfy is scientifically dishonest. Finally, egregious errors in a supposedly scientifically consistent mathematical argument are simply inexcusable and lead me to question the author’s intellectual credibility. Biographical sketch: Peter B. Weichman is a theoretical physicist with research interests and technical publications in a broad array of fields including low temperature physics, solid state physics, fluid dynamics, oceanography, and geophysics. Dr. Weichman obtained a Bachelors degree in physics and applied mathematics from the University of Alberta in 1981, his Doctorate in physics from Cornell University in 1986, and spent the following 12 years in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a faculty member. He is presently a Senior Research Scientist at Blackhawk Geometrics, a geosciences company in Golden, Colorado.
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