String Theory into the Dustbin?

An article in the August 21, 2006, issue of Time has indirect bearing on the evolution vs. Intelligent Design debate. Science writer Michael Lemonick, in "The Unraveling of String Theory," discusses a pair of new books that challenge a current orthodoxy in physics:

Not Even Wrong, by Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit, and The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., both argue that string theory (or superstring theory, as it is also known) is largely a fad propped up by practitioners who tend to be arrogantly dismissive of anyone who dare suggest that the emperor has no clothes.

As I understand it, string theory, which Lemonick says has been around now for nearly 30 years, is an attempt to unify quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, which don't go together all that easily. In quantum theory, energy comes in discrete packets that have a set minimum size. In relativity, energy is a smooth, continuous variable that can be as small as you like.

String theorists hope that such apples-and-oranges differences might be harmonized under the proper mathematical umbrella. Their math requires that there be not four dimensions of spacetime, but ten or more. The ones we do not see have simply collapsed and become vanishingly small.

Furthermore, the smallest objects in the universe are no longer particles, according to the math of string theory, but "minuscule, vibrating loops and snippets of stuff resembling string," says Lemonick. "Bizarre as it seemed, this scheme appeared on first blush to explain why particles have the characteristics they do. As a side benefit, it also included a quantum version of gravity and thus of relativity."

Woit and Smolin, themselves disenchanted string zealots, now assail the theory for having grown way too complex. Each successive new wrinkle in the fashioning of the theory has been smoothed over with "solutions [that] often introduce yet another layer of complexity," in Lemonick's words. "Complexity isn't necessarily the kiss of death in physics, but in this case the new, improved theory posits a nearly infinite number of different possible universes, with no way of showing that ours is more likely than any of the others."


And that is what piques my interest. Genome mapper and evangelical Christian Francis Collins talks in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief of the anthropic principle, which in at least one of its versions notes that (per Wikipedia) "If any of the fundamental physical constants [of our universe] were sufficiently different, then life as we know it would not be possible and no one would be around to contemplate this universe we live in."

There are some number of numerical constants in physics that, in terms of their values, apparently just are what they are. They cannot be derived mathematically from other, simpler numbers or relationships. For example, the gravitational constant, G, which relates the masses of objects along with the distance separating them to the attractive force between them, is one of the "just so" constants of physics.

Presumably, life as we know it could never have evolved in a universe with a different set of constants. Collins believes this is a sign of God's handiwork. Admittedly, this theistic conclusion is not quite a slam dunk, as there are many ways of undermining its logic (see this Wikipedia article for some of them). One is that it is an unremarkable truism: the only reason we are even here to wonder at the issue is because these physical constants were, for whatever reason, just right.

Still, I think the anthropic principle does furnish suggestive (though not conclusive) evidence for God ... unless, that is, there actually do exist — to repeat the phrase used above — "a nearly infinite number of different possible universes, with no way of showing that ours is more likely than any of the others." In that case there would almost certainly be, by sheerest chance, at least one universe within such a collection whose creatures are, like us, capable of mulling over the deeper significance of the anthropic principle.


Here is where the Lemonick article gets very interesting, then. Woit, he says, raises the issue of whether string theory qualifies, even, as a legitimate part of science!

Here's how Lemonick puts it:

Now, it seems, at least some superstring advocates are ready to abandon the essential definition of science itself on the basis that string theory is too important to be hampered by old-fashioned notions of experimental proof.

And it is that absence of proof that is perhaps most damning. Physicists have a tolerance for theory; indeed, unless you were there to witness a phenomenon yourself — the Big Bang, say — it will always be, at some level, hypothetical. But the slow accretion of data and evidence eventually eliminates reasonable doubt. Not so — or at least not yet — with strings.

"It's fine to propose speculative ideas," says Woit, "but if they can't be tested, they're not science." To borrow the withering dismissal coined by the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, they don't even rise to the level of being wrong.

Nobody has yet thought of a way to test string theory empirically, by generating concrete hypotheses based on it and subjecting them to experimental verification. That makes string theory, in a way, much like Intelligent Design theory. ID, the proposal that a power outside this world furnished earthly evolution's directionality by, at various critical junctures, fashioning new, "irreducibly complex" structures like bacterial flagella and eyes, allows of no experimental verification either, say its critics — of which I am one.


On the one hand we have a notion, string theory, which undergirds the possibility of a manifold of universes, sometimes called a "multiverse." Of that manifold entity our universe is putatively just one of a huge number of actual universes, not just imaginable ones, each one slightly different in its fundamental, arbitrary constants of physics, such that the anthropic principle no longer serves as a (weak or strong) argument that there must be a God. String theory can accordingly be thought of as crypto-atheistic.

On the other hand we have a notion, Intelligent Design theory, which suggests evolution couldn't have been undirected; there has to have been an artificer working behind the scenes. ID is accordingly crypto-theistic.

Now it appears that both of these seemingly antithetical proposals share a common characteristic: neither can be falsified by the experimental testing of hypotheses derived from the respective theory itself.

Scoffers at ID say it is consequently bogus science. One would have to have just fallen off the turnip truck not so suppose that a good deal of such hostility to ID is motivated by the personal commitment of the scoffer to a purely materialistic worldview. According to this Wikipedia article on materialism:

Science uses a working assumption, sometimes known as methodological naturalism, that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes without assuming the existence or non-existence of the supernatural.

Materialism, like string theory, is thus subject to the accusation of being crypto-atheistic. Its proponents (as well as a great many other people who are not strict philosophical materialists, myself included) extol the scientific method of inquiry which requires all hypotheses to be experimentally falsifiable. I wonder: would those same materialists, then, agree that string theory too should be chucked into the dustbin of scientific history, on similar grounds to ID?

The Language of God

Francis S. Collins's The Language of God

A new book by Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, represents perhaps the best effort yet to reconcile Darwinism and faith. Collins is a physician-geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project, the collaboration which mapped the sequence of the 3 billion "letters" or base pairs in the DNA every human cell contains, one copy from each parent. The 56-year-old American is a committed evangelical Christian who believes in a God that cares about us and wants to be in fellowship with us. Collins also believes unreservedly in Darwinian evolution.

The main thrust of Collins's book is that belief in Darwin, and in science in general, need not imperil one's faith in God.

Collins himself began his adult life as an atheist who was nonetheless bestirred to question his own lack of belief. He responded to two aspects of his personal inner experience with a certainty that there must be a God and a commitment to evangelical Protestantism.

The first aspect of his personal experience that he couldn't explain from the point of view of a skeptical atheist was his realization that there seems to be a Moral Law common to all human beings in all places and times, from which we each derive a basic, universal notion of right and wrong. According to this Moral Law, acts of altruism are given the highest ethical value, everywhere in the world, even when they are done in secret and can stimulate no possible reciprocity. Evolution theory can't explain that.

Then there is the universality of human wonder at the world and about its Creator: a spiritual hunger which, again, science can't satisfy or even explain. Collins says he found a sense of, yes, joy in the intense longing itself — as did the well-known Christian explicator, C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy. Collins builds on Lewis this way (p. 35):

He [Lewis] describes the experience as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." I can recall clearly some of those moments in my own life, where this poignant sense of longing, falling somewhere between pleasure and grief, caught me by surprise and caused me to wonder from whence came such strong emotion, and how might such an experience be recovered.

These two common threads of human experience, Moral Law and spiritual hunger, neither of which science can explain, convinced Collins that God is real. Yet Collins always wanted to be a scientist and to do science in the way it is meant to be done: to observe phenomena in the material world and then to search for the wholly naturalistic theories that will explain them. Such investigations can yield insights into, among other things, how to cure diseases and alleviate suffering.


Science alone can explain a lot, says Collins, but there are events it can shed little light on, such as whatever led up to the Big Bang, the "singularity" approximately 14 billion years ago which most scientists agree represented the origin of the universe. We may also never know for sure how life on Earth began, some 4 billion years ago.

But most of what science has at one time either gotten wrong or been wholly unable to deal with has historically been filled in or corrected by later science, Collins points out. Early astronomers thought the sun moved around the Earth; Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler proved the opposite. Early naturalists assumed living things were too complex not to have been directly created by God; Darwin showed a way for nature, acting alone, to build up the biosphere's complexity gradually, over eons of time. Human intuition has it that matter and energy are two different things; Einstein showed they are one.

Since the dawn of modern scientific inquiry, remarks Collins, every time we humans have found gaps in our scientific uncerstanding of the material world, we have appealed to a "God of the gaps" to fill them. Nowadays we encounter a gap in explaining life's origins, so some believers in God have proposed "the appearance of DNA and RNA as a possible opportunity for divine creative action" (p. 92). Collins counsels caution here: "Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps" (p. 93).

It might be argued that Collins himself inserts God in a "gap" in our knowledge when he ascribes our altruism and spiritual capacity to divine influence, beyond science's reckoning. His premise here is clearly that God's work within us is not open to empirical inquiry. Hence, these aspects of our inner experience are not scientific "gaps" at all, any more than (say) our uniquely human quality of self-awareness can be fully "explained" as a product of natural evolutionary forces.

Whatever the soul may be, Collins suggests, it can never be a legitimate subject of scientific investigation. Ergo, our altruism and spiritual capacity, as twin aspects of soul, cannot possibly represent explanatory "gaps" which science could one day close. We who love science's logical consistency remain free to seek God, without calling him a "God of the gaps."


Collins himself is trying (I think successfully) to fill a gap: the one between creationists and scientific/academic atheists.

Creationists believe that the stories of creation in Genesis (there are two of them) are more or less literally true. Young Earth Creationists believe in a strict literal interpretation of Genesis which informs them that God made all things in heaven and earth, including humankind, over a six-day period. Extrapolating from information in the Bible, the famous Bishop Ussher dated the inception of the world at 4004 B.C.

Among the leading scientific and academic atheists whom Collins cites are the Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the entomologist/sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. Dawkins, a leading exponent of scientific atheism, has asserted in articles like "Is Science a Religion?" and in books like The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, River out of Eden, and A Devil's Chaplain such things as (see pp. 163ff.; p. 195):

The final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow' disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

[Dawkins's definition of faith is] blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.

The universe we observe has precisely those properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Collins opposes both worldviews. Young Earth Creationism simply nullifies scientific inquiry outright and forces young people who don't want to leave their parents' faith into "effectively committing intellectual suicide" (p. 178). Scientific atheism à la Dawkins gets tangled up in inconsistencies such as holding that there is no good or evil, yet claiming that "faith is one of the world's great evils."


A special type of creationism which Collins takes on all by itself is Intelligent Design theory. The brainchild of Phillip Johnson, a lawyer, along with scientists Michael Behe, William Dembski, and numerous others, ID is the notion that many structures in Earth's life forms are "irreducibly complex." For instance, says Behe, the flagellum of a bacterium is something like an "outboard motor." Used for propulsion, it consists of many interlinked proteins. Each protein serves a particular function; indeed, one of them acts as a sort of "universal joint" such as you might find in the axle of a car.

A protein is a long chain of molecular building blocks, the amino acids. Genes are sequences of DNA, hundreds or thousands of base pairs long, that specify or "code for" these chains of amino acids and thereby call forth the production by living cells of specific proteins. There is presumably a specific gene in flagellar bacteria that codes for the "universal joint" protein.

According to Collins (p. 185), Behe observes that there are about 30 proteins in a bacterial flagellum. That suggests, of course, that there are basically the same number of genes in the bacteria's genome to code for the flagellar proteins. Behe claims that this assemblage of thirty or so genes could not have arisen in step-by-step fashion with each gene individually ratified by Darwinian natural selection, because no one of the thirty proteins coded for by the genes has any utility in itself. Only when you put all thirty proteins together do you have a working flagellum.

Behe and other proponents of ID make similar arguments about, among other things, the eye and the dozen or more proteins that compose the highly effective "human blood-clotting cascade." These and other structures/functions found in living species are said by IDers to exhibit irreducible complexity and thereby to disprove the gradual, step-by-step nature of Darwinian evolution via natural selection. Accordingly, there must instead have been an Intelligent Designer who fashioned these structures intentionally.


Yet in every case, Collins shows, there is good reason to believe that Intelligent Design theory is simply incorrect about these elaborate structures being irreducibly complex. For instance, says Collins (p. 192), " ... comparison of protein sequences from multiple [species of] bacteria has demonstrated that several components of the flagellum are related to an entirely different apparatus used by certain bacteria to inject toxins into other bacteria that they are attacking."

Genetically and evolutionarily, this "type III secretory apparatus," which is less complex than a flagellum, is a way station to the latter. And there may be an as-yet-undiscovered evolutionary stepping stone to the former ... and so on, and so on, and so on, until the whole notion of irreducible complexity gives up the ghost.

Furthermore, contrary to Intelligent Design's assumptions, says Collins, it is actually rather easy, over the span of evolutionary time, to alter the influence a given gene exerts by way of the protein for which it codes. If you are Mother Nature, all you have to do is introduce into a particular genome a copy of an existing gene, call it A. A continues to perform its original mission, while A', the copy, is free to mutate and thereby code for a brand new protein. Get just the right bunch of these putatively "useless" new proteins together — I'm reading between Collins's lines here, by the way — and a "type III secretory apparatus" can become a flagellum. And, says Collins, gene duplication and subsequent mutation happen quite a lot in nature, down through countless generations.


Which by no means implies there's no God. All it really does to harm faith is to require that certain Bible passages not be interpreted literally. Instead, says Collins, people of faith should be open to the idea that a God outside time who made the laws of the universe foreknew what those laws would produce via evolution: moral creatures whose spiritual hunger would bring them one day into personal communion with Him.


P.S. Here is an excellent New York Times review of several recent books, including Collins's, on all sides of the subject of whether belief in God makes sense for a scientific Darwinist.