It is possible, I suppose, to construct hypothetical circumstances in which you would be please to find yourself, at the end of a long day, in Macksville, New South Wales – perhaps something to do with rising sea levels that left it as the only place on earth not underwater, or maybe some disfiguring universal contagion from which it alone remained unscathed. In the normal course of events, however, it is unlikely that you would find yourself standing on its lonely main street at six-thirty on a warm summer’s evening gazing about you in an appreciative manner and thinking, “Well, thank goodness I’m here!”

A memorable passage. It has been used to teach English to the French (Baccalaureat), and as an example of “Powerful & Balanced Writing”. It’s even popped up in the New York Times.

Now is probably the right time to mention that approximately 29 years ago, I was born in Macksville Hospital. I lived in West st, Macksville until I was 16. I have since lived in Sydney, Cambridge (UK), Zurich and now Sydney again. I have holidayed in the Macksville region every summer since moving away.

I must admit that laughter was my first reaction to Macksville’s treatment at Bryson’s hand. There is a lot that hits close to home. However, there are a few facts to be corrected. Either Bryson has embellished for comic effect, or else his powers of observation are somewhat weaker than one would expect for a travel writer.

“I was in Macksville for the night, owing to the interesting discovery that Brisbane is not three or four hours north of Sydney, as I had long and casually supposed, but the better part of a couple of days’ drive.“ 

Crap. After visiting Macksville, Bryson shows that he has the navigatory nous to find an obscure historical site (pre-satnav era, of course). He has been in Australia for eleven chapters. Having arrived in Macksville, he opens his book of maps. His arrival in Macksville is either moronic or contrived.

“Set on the bank of the swift and muddy Nambucca River …”

Judge for yourself:

Need more photos? Macksville is on a coastal plain. There isn’t a mountain within a hundred miles. The river is never swift, and except for a day or two after very heavy rain it isn’t muddy either (Bryson refers to the “dusty margin” of town, so it is unlikely that rain preceded his visit).

Actually, Bryson’s only experience of Macksville is a stretch of road about 100 metres long in the middle of town. Here is a brief tour of the wider area. Many thanks to the websites / facebook friends from whom I “borrowed” these photos. An Aerial shot of Macksville, looking East.

15 minutes North, the Nambucca River meets the sea. (Thanks, Brad.):

Beaches are available.

10 Minutes south-west – Scotts Head

5 minutes south-west – Way Way State Forest 

20 Minutes south-west: Yarriabini National Park

Further afield, you’ll find the Promised Land, Coffs Harbour and Dorrigo’s World Heritage rainforest. There are 80 national parks on the north coast. And a marine park.

Bryson wonders at the “miraculous notion” that some people can call this region home. I had a few photos like the ones above on my computer desktop in Cambridge and Zurich. Colleagues wondered aloud why I ever left.

The Chinese restaurant was just across the road as promised, but according to a sign in the window it was not licensed to serve alcohol and I couldn’t face small town Chinese food without the solace of beer.

Macksville Chinese is BYO (Bring Your Own). You find the nearest bottle shop (“Off Licence” if you’re from the UK) and buy your own supply of alcohol. Bryson is in the Macksville Hotel. The nearest bottle shop is across the road – literally 30 metres away, and between the Hotel and the restaurant. Powers of observation…

I have travelled enough to know that a chef does not, as a rule, settle in a place like Macksville because he has a lifelong yearning to share the subtleties of 3,500 years of Szechuan cuisine with sheep farmers.

Perhaps a Chinese family exchanging the communist “paradise” of 1980’s China for Australia isn’t as picky as Bryson imagines. He’ll never know. (I’ve eaten many times at Macksville Chinese. A lot of special occasions – usually birthday dinners – were spent there, so every mouthful is coated in a few inches of nostalgia. I won’t even pretend to give an unbiased review. My optimistic suspicion is: possibly about average.)

Another baffling observation appears in this passage. There are no sheep. The Mid North Coast is a cattle farming region. I’ve driven from between Macksville and Sydney at least 100 times in my life and I’ve never seen a sheep farm. Maybe a couple of lambs. But cows – everywhere. Cows outnumber sheep by 100 to 1 on the Mid North Coast. Exchanging “sheep” with “cattle” in the passage above doesn’t change it’s impact, of course. But I do start to wonder just how often Bryson glanced out the window on his drive north.

So I went off to see what else there might be in Macksville’s compact heart. The answer was very little. … Bub’s [Hotbake] had a substantial range of food, nearly all of it involving brown meat and gravy lurking inside pastry. I ordered a large sausage roll and chips.

`We don’t do chips,’ said the amply proportioned serving maiden.

`Then how did you get like that?’ I wanted to say, but of course I suppressed this unworthy thought and revised my order to a large sausage roll and something called a `continental cheesecake square’ and went with them outside. I ate standing on the comer.

Bryson’s indignation aside, this passage tells the story of a man asking for fried chips in a bakery. Bub’s Hotbake – the clue is very much in the name. Macksville is admittedly light on restaurants, mostly because the larger town of Nambucca is 10 minutes drive away. Matilda’s, for example, comes recommended by Lonely Planet and serves the Barramundi on which Bryson had set his heart. Seafood isn’t hard to come by when the Pacific Ocean is just around the corner. Also, the views of the Nambucca River near Macksville in the pictures above are about 50 metres from Bub’s Hotbake, easily viewable from the picnic tables. Why he stood on the corner – I have no idea.

Bryson hits rather closer to the mark when he notes the struggle that the news has in making world events seem relevant to Australia. The world feels a long way away. It is a long way away. The local newspaper didn’t have the broadest view of world events. The second page of the Nambucca Guardian News once reported that the Macksville Golf Club’s greenskeeper’s dog had recently been feeling ill. A picture of the dog was included. The dog made a full recovery.

And yet, this isolation is not self absorption. There is something about the region that I notice whenever I return. A thought pops into my head as I float in these waters, surrounded by sunshine and sand. I get the feeling that I should do a lot more of this. I couldn’t answer the charge of laziness, but I know what procrastination is (I write a blog!) and this is not it. I am not wasting my time.

My friends and classmates have taken different paths – lawyers, teachers, bankers, graphic designers, builders, parents, the very occasional astrophysicist. Those who have stayed in the area have a different approach to life. Work a small thing. Life is elsewhere. They aren’t loafers, couch potatoes – they work very hard at enjoying life. Surfers and fishermen will rise before dawn and go to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of just the right conditions.

“What did you do for fun, growing up in the country?” You just need to know the right places. Get on your bike, ride along the train line, climb under the bridge, across a small creek, through the barbed wire fence and across a paddock and you’ll find a location known simply as “the tree”. It was the ideal set up: a tall gum tree, leaning over deep freshwater, rungs nailed into the trunk and a rope swing on a high branch. Adrenaline on tap. Macksville is boring – of course it is. It’s a town. It’s where you buy milk. Macksville is not why you live in Macksville.

There is a logical fallacy known as appealing to authority, which goes like this.

1. X believes Y

2. X is very clever / a well known expert / a professor / a reliable person …

3. Thus, Y is true

This is a fallacy because people can be wrong, even smart people.

However, we all believe things because someone told us so. We would make impossibly slow progress in life if we had to verify every belief for ourselves. There are people we usually trust – not blindly but because they’ve proven trustworthy. 

Modern science has a rather strained relationship with authority. On the one hand, much of science’s early progress came from following the maxim: “don’t believe everything Aristotle said”. If you want to know what the natural world is like, go ask the natural world. Go into the lab, go get a telescope, go find out for yourself. Experiments shouldn’t just be repeatable. They should be repeated.

On the other hand, science has made so much progress, collected so much data, published so many papers that no one person can have checked it all out for themselves. The astronomy preprint archive posts about 100 new astronomy papers per day. We are reliant on the honesty and competence of other scientists who provide us with measurements, constants, equations, simulations. We can check some of it but not all.

The layman is in an even worse position, as they may not have the training, time and skills to verify the conclusions of science even if they wanted to. Should Jo(e) Public believe that the universe is expanding because scientists say so? Or should they build their own telescope, invent the spectrometer, locate and observe distant galaxies, measure atomic emission spectra, calculate the recession velocities of the galaxies, observe Cepheid variable stars, discover their period-magnitude relation, use this relation to measure the distance to galaxies, note the linear dependence of velocity on distance, discover general relativity, solve for an expanding spacetime, derive the linear dependence of velocity on distance, and then (and only then) conclude that the universe is expanding?

The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle: Jo(e) public can understand how scientists have reached the conclusion that the universe is expanding, so that this central pillar of the Big Bang theory is not pure assertion. They can follow our path on a map, as it were, even if they do not tread every step again themselves. Science ultimately appeals to observations of the natural world, even if they are usually someone else’s observations.

So when should we believe an authority? When does quoting an authority commit the aforementioned fallacy? The key is to be specific about what is being claimed.

Authority as evidence

We mustn’t confuse knowledge with certainty. We need to reason using probabilities. Bayes theorem teaches us how to update our probabilities when new, relevant information comes to light. Learning that a particular expert believes something is new, relevant information. It may not be decisive, but shouldn’t be ignored. 

1′. X believes Y

2′. X is in a position to assess the evidence for and against Y. X is informed, competent, experienced, has a reputation for honesty, has no conflict of interest etc.

3′. Thus, the probability of Y being true has increased.

A belief is justified or warranted if it was formed using reliable methods, which can be counted on to produce true beliefs most of the time. Recognising those methods in another person adds weight to their opinion.

Authority as establishing the burden of proof

I really shouldn’t choose such a hot-button topic to make a point like this, but it’s such a good example that I can’t resist. Take climate change. The majority of the climate science community has concluded that the evidence supports the hypothesis that human activity has and will lead to substantial, detrimental changes to our planet’s climate. 

Does that prove that climate change is real? No. Proving is something that mathematicians do. It does, however, set the standard for those who believe that climate change is not real. The scientific consensus is prima facie evidence of the truth of climate change. Jo(e) Public is justified, in the absence of the time and skills to investigate for themselves, in believing that climate change is more likely to be true than false. Those who wish to believe that climate change is probably not real have the burden of showing that the scientists are wrong.

This is an application of my last point – authority as evidence. The consensus of an expert, informed community tips the scales in favour of climate change. The pronouncements of scientists are not infallible, but should not be rejected without good scientific reasons. Political conservativism, conspiracy theories and a desire to be viewed as an “iconoclast” are not good reasons.

Authority and Relevance

A key idea in the previous section was relevance. When an climate scientist reaches a conclusion about the state of the Earth’s climate, he is commenting on exactly the thing that s/he studies. There is a danger of experts being viewed as generically clever and thus authorities in any field they care to address. As usual, xkcd summarises the point beautifully.

Physicists

Another controversial example. I once saw someone on TV (possibly a news vox pop), when asked about life after death, cite as conclusive evidence the fact that Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe that there is life after death. Now, I have every respect for the prodigious talents of Professor Hawking, a scientist about whom the superlative “greatest” justifiably hovers. But none of the things that Hawking has done to gain his reputation have anything to do with life after death. He is an expert on quantum gravity, black holes, general relativity, and the cosmology of the very early universe.

Is there any evidence for life after death? Near death experiences, religious revelation, philosophical (metaphysical) arguments for the immateriality of the soul, and widespread belief in life after death around the world and throughout history are the factors usually cited. So the relevant areas of expertise are medicine, especially neuroscience, as well as a familiarity with the claims of witnesses, the psychology of human beings (e.g. fear of death), philosophy, comparative religion, etc. Life after death is usually taken to be incompatible with philosophical materialism, so philosophical arguments for materialism are also relevant. Prof. Hawking is not an expert in any of these areas. There are, I assume, plenty of doctors, neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers with the relevant expertise who discount near death experiences and the afterlife. If you want to cite an authority, cite them. Hawking’s opinion in this area is worthy of consideration, of course, but not authoritative.

Beware of 8 out of 10 Authorities

The previous point applies a fortiori to surveys of experts. For example, the fact that a larger-than-average percentage of scientists do not believe in God would seem to explain itself. But there is a possible selection effect. It’s the same selection effect that one may suspect is behind the fact that, while (roughly) 80% of philosophers are atheists, this drops to just 20% of those philosophers who specialise in philosophy of religion.

It’s the same old correlation vs. causation story. Did a random sample enter both fields, and thereafter have their views moulded by their respective subject matter? Or did a prior belief in God lead some to be philosophers of religion, while a lack of belief led others to become scientists? A survey of 1,646 scientists by Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund led her to conclude that (from here): 

Ecklund concludes from her research that most scientists do not become irreligious as a consequence of their becoming scientists. “Rather, their reasons for unbelief mirror the circumstances in which other Americans find themselves: they were not raised in a religious home; they have had bad experiences with religion; they disapprove of God or see God as too changeable.” The disproportionately high percentage of nonbelievers among scientists (as compared to the general population) would appear to be the result of self-selection: the irreligious seem more likely to become scientists in the first place.

I’m not a sociologist, so I can’t critique Ecklund’s work. The point is that individual biases don’t necessarily average themselves out over a population of experts, so appealing to lots of authorities isn’t necessarily an improvement.

Authority as a counterexample to the accusation of ignorance

The defender of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God claims that the universe has a beginning. One argument goes as follows:

Premise 1. An actual infinite cannot exist in reality.

Premise 2. An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite.

Premise 3. Therefore, an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist.

Reasoning with actual infinites requires knowledge of mathematics, specifically transfinite arithmetic. The argument’s best known defender is William Lane Craig.Craig is not a mathematician, and so one might wonder whether he is sufficiently familiar with the relevant mathematics. We all know of arguments that reveal more about the ignorance of the arguer than about the subject at hand.

There are two ways for Craig to counter the accusation that a greater knowledge of mathematics would lead one to reject Premise 1. The long way is to demonstrate his own proficiency in transfinite arithmetic. That would take a while. He discusses the topic at length in his book “The Kalam Cosmological Argument” if you want to take that route. There is a shortcut, however. Craig could provide an example of someone whose mathematical credentials are unquestioned and who affirms Premise 1. Craig can do this, and so usually does so in shortened presentations like debates. The authority is David Hilbert, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and who argued that “the actual infinite is nowhere to be found in reality”.

This is a valid appeal to authority, so long as we are clear on what is being claimed. Obviously, we cannot claim that Premise 1 is true because Hilbert thought so. But we can counter the accusation that anyone who believes Premise 1 is ignorant of mathematics and doesn’t understand the idea of infinity.

(Note well: I’m not defending premise 1. I’m planning a series on the cosmological arguments, so stay tuned. I’m not convinced by “Hilbert’s hotel is metaphysically absurd” style arguments. And, as Jeff Shallit has pointed out, mathematical knowledge of transfinite arithmetic is a necessary but not sufficient qualification as we are dealing with the applicability of mathematics to reality, which is physics. The accusation that “greater knowledge of physics / cosmology / relativity would lead one to reject Premise 1” can also be countered: George Ellis. The main utility of these authorities, I contend, is to take our attention away from the claimers and focus attention on the claims. We won’t get stuck in a useless debate about whether Craig really understands maths.).

Authority and hostile witnesses

A particularly useful form of appealing to authority is the use of a hostile witness. In this context, a hostile witness is one who attests to a fact in the teeth of their own biases. If someone who hates the defendant’s guts nevertheless corroborates his alibi, then this has greater weight as evidence than such corroboration from a friend of the defendant. It works in reverse as well: if the defendant’s loving wife testifies that he was out of the house between 10pm and 1am, knowing that this was the time of the murder, then this is weighty evidence. She has every reason to give him an alibi, and so the most likely reason for her statement is that it is true.

This is one of the reasons that the study of history is not paralyzed by the inevitable bias of those who write history. Is the New Testament useless as a historical record, because its writers were followers of Jesus? Not necessarily, because this bias can be used in our favour. If the gospel writers admit something about Jesus that was an embarrassment to them, then we have good reason to believe that they did not invent this story to suit their own ends.

For example, Mark 13:32 has Jesus saying “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”. If we can establish that the early Christians believed that Jesus was divine, then there is a strong bias against inventing a saying of Jesus that says that he didn’t know something. It’s not proof, but it is evidence.

As before, we must be clear about the claim that the authority is supporting. A hostile witness can be used to counter the claim that only those biased in favour of a position believe its claims. I’ve come across this in the context of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. This subject is so popular with theists that I often encounter the claim that it is the product of Christian apologetics, and believed only by “religious types”. Actually, much has been written on fine-tuning in peer-reviewed scientific journals and I can (and have) give many examples of non-theist physicists who affirm that life-permitting universes are rare in the set of possible universes.

But don’t take my word for it …

The discovery of the Higgs particle is, first and foremost, a ringing affirmation of fundamental harmony between Mind and Matter.  Mind, in the form of human thought, was able to predict the existence of a qualitatively new form of Matter before ever having encountered it, based on esthetic preference for beautiful equations.

A nice talk from Jeff Shallit from Recursivity on numerology. I’m going to forward it to a guy who keeps emailing me about his “Final Formula” of physics:

which has the same problem with units that Shallit’s marvellous Washington Monument example does.

That said, there have been a few episodes in physics where something that looks alarmingly like numerology proved successful, such as Gell-Mann’s 8-fold way. Murray Gell-Mann plotted mesons and spin-1/2 baryons on a plot with charge on a horizontal axis and strangeness on the diagonal. The particles formed an octagon with two particles at the centre. He also plotted the  spin-3/2 baryons, which formed a triangle, but with the apex missing. Gell-Mann predicted the existence of the particle that would complete the triangle, together with its strangeness, charge and mass. Two years later, it was discovered.

Is this really numerology? I’m not familiar with Eddington’s argument, but my suspicion is that the difference is in predictive power. Gell-Mann predicted the existence of a particle, its properties and was ultimately led to the quark model, whereas the zero-predictive-power of Eddington’s ideas were displayed by his easy switch from pulling 136 out of a mathematical hat to producing 137.

The moral of the story seems to a combination of the following:

• While successful physical theories can predict relationships between physical quantities that would otherwise appear to be coincidences, searching for such coincidences in the absence of a deeper physical theory is not a good way to discover the laws of nature.
• The deeper we go into the laws of nature, the more remarkable simplicity we uncover. The applicability of group theory and symmetry to particle physics is a good illustration of this.
• The power of science comes not from its ability to make assumptions about nature, but the ability to test those assumptions and discard those that fail. That’s why this quote from Mark Twain about “wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact” only tells half the story of science. In particular, one must keep an eye on the relationship between the number of free parameters and the number of data points, so that we can tell the difference between prediction (where the data tests the model) and curve-fitting (where the data creates the model).

On a related note, its good to see that, even a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the name Luke remains as popular as ever.

Also, another gem from SMBC:

I have a few points to make in response. What follows is a critique of the table above, not of the Bible or Christianity. (All quotes from the NIV).

Dubious interpretations of the Bible

Isaiah 40:22 is usually translated “circle of the Earth”, and is ambiguous between a disk and a sphere. In any case, the phrase plausibly refers to the shape of the horizon, not the entire Earth.

John 38:19-20 says: “Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home?”. This couldn’t be more obviously poetical, and is not making any claim about the physical properties of light.

Hebrews 11:3 is categorically not stating that the world is made of atoms. It states that “the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” It is stating that God’s creation of the universe is out of nothing, rather than out of pre-existing material that God simply rearranged. In any case, atoms are not literally invisible. Bernard Ramm’s “The Christian View of Science and Scripture” shot down this interpretation in 1954.

Dubious Science Then

There are no references in the middle column. Many of these claims are doubtful. Stars have different colours, obvious to the naked eye on a dark night. So it is very unlikely that they thought all stars were the same. Ancient Babylonian and Greek astronomy didn’t believe that the world rested on an animal. The ancient Greeks, and particularly Aristotelian physics, knew that the air had weight (i.e. they knew that air would sink towards the centre of the Earth).

Sick people were bled under the Hippocratic medical theory of ancient Greece. The theory does not deny the importance of blood to life. Blood was “let” in order to restore balance to the “humors” , not because blood was useless. They knew that things bled to death. In any case, the theory is unlikely to have been known to the writer of Leviticus, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that the ancient Hebrews knew that bleeding things died.

The table assumes a great deal of uniformity in the natural philosophy of the ancients. Everyone thought that there were only 1100 stars? Everyone thought that the ocean floor was flat?

Dubious Science Now

Science now does not know whether there are innumerable stars, if that is taken to mean an infinite number of stars.

It is obviously something of an overstatement to say that blood is the “source of life and health”. Certainly, I’d rather keep mine but blood is a product of life rather than a source.

The logical problem with finding modern science in the Bible

This entire line of argument is deeply flawed. In these passages, the Bible is not attempting to teach facts about nature. The writer is using facts about nature to illustrate other, non-scientific points. When Paul says “The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor”, he is using this as an example of the different kinds of physical things that exist: “Not all flesh is the same” (verse 42).

Similarly, the writer of Ecclesiastes, when he states that “The wind blows to the south, and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course” he is not teaching about the winds. He is using the winds as an illustration of the point that (verse 9) “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

There is no point using an illustration if the reader is not familiar with it. The fact that these writers can appeal to a certain fact to illustrate a point shows that it was something that his audience believed. If they said: “everything just goes round in circles, like the electron in orbit around an atomic nucleus”, the readers wouldn’t have understood. Even if God had whispered a scientific fact in their ear, they would have had no use for it.

This applies just as obviously in reverse, to those passages which contradict modern science. For example, in Job 37 Elihu says: “Listen to this, Job; stop and consider God’s wonders. Do you know how God controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash? … can you join him in spreading out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast bronze?”. The point of this poetical passage is not to teach something about the skies (which aren’t hard, you may know), but rather God’s authority over nature¹. There is (arguably) no tension between acknowledging the scientific inaccuracy of this passage and the view that the Bible is inerrant in all that it teaches. No statement of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy implies that the writers of the Bible were correct in all that they believed.

Galileo understood this.

These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities, Of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. …

I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense­ experiences and necessary demonstrations; for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God’s commands. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men.

Footnotes:

1. A few caveats. The passage claims only to be a record of a conversation between Elihu and Job, and when God appears in the next chapter he doesn’t exactly endorse all the ideas expressed so far. Also and as always, translation from any ancient language is a subtle art. The word translated “mirror” only appears once in the bible and may indicate an appearance, “skies” can be translated “clouds”, “cast bronze” could mean “molten”, so that the verse might say “Can you, with Him, spread out the mighty clouds, with a molten appearance?”. This fits the emphasis of the chapter on weather (thunder, rain, winds, clouds) rather than God’s original creation. I’m in no place to give an expert opinion on ancient Hebrew – I just did a bit of Googling. Work it out for yourself.

The show is pitched as an experiment. In particular, I’m going to discuss the segment in which “an atheist [Natalie] is given a religious conversion” via what Brown calls psychological techniques. The results of the experiment are very striking – I encourage you to watch the video, if you can.

Let’s begin by reminding ourselves of what an experiment is. Very simply, an experiment is a controlled attempt to link a particular cause to a particular effect. If you want to know whether morphine can relieve pain in humans, you might think that you just give people in pain morphine and then ask if the pain went away. However, this experiment cannot tell whether it was really the morphine that did it. Thus, we must use a control.

The idea of a control is to use two experiments that differ only in the presence or absence of what we’ll call the active ingredient. We must be able to control both the active ingredient and the other variables.  It is crucial that in every other way, the experiments are as identical as possible. In medicine, one crucial variable is the mental state of the patient, which is why the trial must be double blind – to factor out the placebo effect, patients and even their doctors cannot know whether the pill is real or fake.

Thus we come to Derren Brown’s experiment. I have four criticisms.

1. There is no control.

An effect is caused, but in the absence of a control, it isn’t clear to what it should be ascribed. This points to an even deeper problem.

2. The active ingredient is not supposed to be belief in God.

That one can produce a religious experience in the absence of belief in God is not an interesting conclusion. Plenty of religious people claim that a religious experience caused (and thus preceded) their belief in God. In fact, it would be much more embarrassing to the religious cause if religious experiences only happened in cases where the subject already believed in God, since that would make it seem as if the prior belief created the experience. Brown excludes this hypothesis.

3. The active ingredient is supposed to be God.

Tonight I’m going to investigate what I think could be the biggest placebo of them all – God. … This innate hardwiring we have really can give a powerful experience of God, without any need for Him to exist.

God himself (if you’ll allow the traditional masculine pronoun) is the active ingredient. Brown is claiming that he can create a religious experience in the absence of any action of God.

Let’s repeat the experimental logic, as we applied it to morphine (cause) and pain relief (effect) above. To adequately test the causal connection between religious experiences and God, Brown would need to control God. At the very least, he would need to perform an experiment in the absence of God. He would need to build a divine Faraday cage, to shield the possible effects of God.

Obviously, this is not what Brown has achieved. The experiment only proves that God is not required for a religious experience if there is no God, for only then is the active ingredient known to be missing from the experiment. Brown cannot exclude God as the cause of the experience without begging the question. The most he can claim is that he can do it “without mentioning God at all”. And that, clearly, is not the same thing.

Brown’s “don’t mention the war” approach is unlikely to hold an omnipresent being at arm’s length. The casual equivocation between “no God” and “no mention of God” is pure bait-and-switch.

4. That a phenomena is natural or can be produced by natural means does not exclude the action of God.

What Brown has in mind when he thinks of God causing a religious experience is a miracle – some suspension of the laws of nature, angels on clouds, a voice from the heavens etc. But this assumes a distinction between God and nature to which theism does not ascribe. If God exists, and the knowledge of God is a good thing, then we would expect God to create a universe in which belief in God is readily available to the masses. One way of achieving this end would be to create a universe in which belief in God comes naturally, in some sense. Thus, we might expect a religious experience or a sense of the divine to be evoked by sunrises, newborn babies, the night sky, beautiful and powerful music, great art, a feeling of smallness, awe, or the numinous (Otto), “the sense of absolute dependence” (Schleiermacher), a reflection on moral experience, the sense of and a need for love and joy, etc. It would be an intentional, designed feature of human psychology that purely natural (internal and external) stimuli could evoke such an experience.

In short, Brown’s claim to show that religious belief comes “from us, not from the divine” is a false dilemma – if theism is true, then we (ultimately) and everything else comes from the divine. A religious experience need not be a supernatural experience. It would be a rather slapdash universe which never hinted at God’s existence, never evoked a sense of his presence, and relied on God to stick His finger in every time He wanted someone to ponder their Creator.

Further, Brown’s experiment involves evoking Natalie’s own memories, which are of external phenomena, so the claim that the religious experience is entirely internally created (“all from you”) is unjustified. Natalie herself makes this point quite well.

But inducing an emotional reaction to something, if it’s through external influences, is always artificial in a way …  If I’m listening to an amazing piece of music, that’s an emotional stimulus that’s come from an artificial source …

Brown rather revealingly jumps in to cut her off at this point.

Sehnsucht 101

Perhaps the best known Christian quote outside the Bible comes from St Augustine:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

If you showed Augustine an experiment in which thinking upon one’s own moral condition and one’s experiences of love and awe created in an unbeliever a religious experience involving a spontaneous expression of repentance and thankfulness, a longing for forgiveness and healing, and a feeling of “all the love in the world” (Natalie’s own words), he would surely say “that’s exactly what I was talking about!”. As Brown says, “even atheists … are born with an inbuilt, hardwired tendency to believe”.

The Apostle Paul would agree.

God [so ordered the world and its people] so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being [Epimenides].’ (Acts 17:27-28)

Keith Ward agrees.

The chief mark of a religious sensibility is well portrayed by William Blake when he speaks of holding ‘infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour’. The religious sensibility is the apprehension of a deeper reality known in and through some finite reality, and conveying a sense of overwhelming value and power. Such a sense can be conveyed by the beauties of the natural world, by the elegance and complexity of physical structures, and by great works of art, literature and music. It may be called a ‘sense of transcendence’, of beauty, power and goodness, which communicates an apprehension of a reality underlying the appearance of space, time and sense. (Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, emphasis added.)

C.S. Lewis would agree.

Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy…. The Christian says, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. … If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. … [E]arthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. (Mere Christianity, Pg 118. See also the last chapter of The Problem of Pain.).

My point is not to defend Lewis’ inference – make of the argument from desire what you will. My point is that Brown’s experiment in no way creates a problem for religion. In fact, Paul, Augustine and Lewis would be positively thrilled with the results of Brown’s work. A few reminders of a caring parent and the subject spontaneously, heart-breakingly cries out for “all the love in the world” – a better example of sehnsucht could scarcely be invented.

No religion believes that every religious encounter must result from God visibly sticking His finger into the universe and creating an experience completely independently of the laws of nature and the environment, culture, personality, and life-experiences of the individual involved. Brown’s experiment fails to support his conclusion. He has no basis for concluding that the experience “didn’t come from God”.

Postscript. One lurking problem with the entire show is that Brown could have tried out the exercise on large numbers of individuals, and only shown us the ones that worked. The experiment only takes 15 minutes. He has made precisely this point on earlier shows. His shows are based on deception, as he has stated. The best example of this is the lottery episode, which was pure bullshit. Entertaining, yes, but a clear indication that Brown is perfectly willing to use and abuse scientific (sounding) explanations to his own ends.

I’ll be discussing the book in more detail in future, but listening to Krauss crystallised in my mind why I believe that science in principle cannot explain why anything exists.

Let me clear about one thing before I start. I say all of this as a professional scientist, as a cosmologist. I am in the same field as Krauss. This is not an antiscience rant. I am commenting on my own field.

Firstly, the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” is equivalent to the question “why does anything at all exist?”. However, Krauss et al have decided to creatively redefine nothing (with no mandate from science – more on that in a later post) so that the question becomes more like “why is there a universe rather than a quantum space time foam?”. So I’ll focus on the second formulation, since it is immune to such equivocations.

Here is my argument.
A: The state of physics at any time can be (roughly) summarised by three things.

1. A statement about what the fundamental constituents of physical reality are and what their properties are.
2. A set of mathematical equations describing how these entities change, move, interact and rearrange.
3. A compilation of experimental and observational data.

In short, the stuff, the laws and the data.

B: None of these, and no combination of these, can answer the question “why does anything at all exist?”.

C: Thus physics cannot answer the question “why does anything at all exist?”.

Let’s have a closer look at the premises. I’m echoing here the argument of David Albert in his review of Krauss’ book, which I thoroughly recommend. Albert says,

[W]hat the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged.

For example, in Newtonian physics the fundamental constituents are particles, absolute space and absolute time, the laws are Newton’s laws of motion and equations that describe the forces at work in the universe e.g. gravity, and the data are things like the motion of the planets, rolling down an inclined plane etc. After James Clerk Maxwell, we add to the basic stuff electromagnetic fields, and add his equations to the laws, and to the data add observations of electromagnetic phenomena. The standard model of particle physics has quantum fields and Einsteinian space time as the basic stuff, the laws are standard model Lagrangian and general relativity, and throw in all the data of particle accelerators and such. (I’m glossing over a lot here, obviously, but you get the idea.) Various theories beyond the standard model postulate different stuff and laws e.g. String theory, loop quantum gravity. In some of these theories, there is an attempt or at least the hope that the theory will be able to treat spacetime itself as a derived thing, that there will be something in the theory even more fundamental than space and time, out of which space and time can be made (so-called background independent theories).

Now, why think that neither the stuff, the laws or the data or a combination can answer the question of why anything exists?

1 can’t do it: A statement of the basic constituents of reality, in and of itself, obviously cannot explain why such things exist, any more than the statement “the sky is blue” can explain why the sky is blue. So 1 is out.

2 can’t do it: Mathematical equations describe properties, and existence is not a property. 5 dollars plus 5 dollars equals 10 dollars, but that fact will not tell you how much money is actually in my account. The same is true for all mathematical equations, even the more sophisticated ones used by modern physics. Write down any equation you like – you will not be able to deduce from that equation that the thing it describes really exists. Mathematical equations are abstract entities, they have no causal powers. They can’t do anything, least of all jump off the blackboard and pull entities into existence. So the answer cannot be found in 2.

1 and 2 can’t do it: 1 and 2 together give a theoretical description of reality as we know it, so succumb to the same problems as 2 alone.

3 can’t do it: for the same reason that 1 can’t. The statement “I observed an electron strike a screen” cannot explain why there are electrons at all, and thus (a fortiori) cannot explain why anything exists at all.

1, 2 and 3 can’t do it: Sitting and staring at 1+2 on one hand, and 3 on the other, will tell you why we think that 1+2 really describes our universe. They account for the data, which is what science does. But once again we see no resources to attack the question of why anything at all exists. We’ve successfully described our universe. But that is all.

Thus, physics cannot answer the question “why does anything at all exist?”.

It is important to realise that no amount of progress in physics will change this situation. Imagine the final equation, the law of nature, written on a blackboard to thunderous applause. After the adoration dies down, we will still be faced with the question “why does a universe described by that equation actually exist?”. The answer cannot be found in the equation. Stephen Hawking said it well:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? (from A Brief History of Time)

Krauss’ new “scientific” “nothing” consists of yet more hypothesised fundamental entities and laws which govern their behaviour. In Q&A, Krauss appeared to deny that there were such laws, but his book makes it clear that by “no laws” what he really means is laws that are “stochastic and random”, admitting that “Although to be fair, to make any scientific progress in calculating possibilities, we generally assume that certain properties, like quantum mechanics, permeate all possibilities.” The novelty of Krauss’ particular stuff is that it is (hypothesised to be) more fundamental even than space and time. But it is still stuff. And the mathematical laws that describe its properties and behaviour still cannot explain why it exists at all.

If you are a philosophical materialist – if you believe that everything that exists is ultimately the stuff of physics – then this question is unanswerable. Not just unanswered – I have no problem with questions that science cannot currently answer. It’s because of such questions that I have a job. But materialism simply doesn’t have the resources to answer that question. To be a materialist, one must convince oneself that the question is somehow meaningless, that it is nonsense masquerading as one of the deepest and oldest philosophical questions mankind has ever asked.

Is theism’s answer any better? The attempt is as follows: if everything that exists does so contingently, that is, if it is possible that it could not exist, then the question of why anything at all exists is unanswerable. Given anything that exists, we would still be left with the question as to why it exists. To answer this question, we must postulate the existence of a necessary being, that is, one who can’t fail to exist, the reason for whom’s existence is found within itself, rather than externally. This is not creating an arbitrary exception for God. It is asking what kind of thing must exist in order to explain the existence of contingent things. It is the search for a sufficient explanation for existence that leads us to a metaphysically necessary being.

A plague of questions spring to mind. Does that even make sense? What kind of thing is a metaphysically necessary being? Why think that the necessary being is a person? Why couldn’t it be the universe? We get rather quickly into deep philosophical waters here. But that is my point. Physics simply cannot inform these questions, one way or the other. It cannot speak to ultimate existence, it cannot observe or model necessity. If the necessary being turns out to be the universe (a view that almost no modern philosophers defend), then this will not be a scientific conclusion – no observation could establish that fact. I agree with Martin Rees, who said

[P]hysics can never explain what ‘breathes fire’ into the equations, and actualised them into a real cosmos.  The fundamental question of ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ remains the province of philosophers. And even they may be wiser to respond, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, what ‘whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent’.

Every sport has its fables and epics, and nothing attracts a story like an outlier. In statistics, an outlier is an event that is way out on its own, deviating significantly from the rest of the population. In cricket, for example, the primary statistic that measures how good a batter is is the batting average, defined as the average number of runs per dismissal. The details aren’t required here; it will suffice to say that an average of above 50 in test cricket marks out one of the greats. Below (top) is a plot of the batting averages of all those who have played test cricket.

We see few players with an average greater than 50, and even fewer above 60. And then comes the outlier, way off to the right – Donald Bradman, with a career average of 99.94. His other career statistics are similarly off-the-scale. The premier achievement for a batter in a match is to score a hundred runs in a single innings, a century. Bradman did it 29 times in his career of 80 innings. Of the 7 batters who have scored as many or more centuries, all required at least twice as many innings. Cricket is one of the few sports in which the question “who was the greatest?” attracts little debate.

Cricket has also seen freakish matches. On the 12th of March, 2006, Australia played South Africa in a One Day International (ODI) match. At the time, these two teams were the number 1 and 2 ranked teams in the world. Australia, batting first, smashed the record for the most runs scored by a team in an innings. Their 434 runs easily surpassed England’s 391 against Bangladesh and New Zealand’s 397 against Zimbabwe, totals both reached against much lower ranked teams. Australia’s record stood for just a few hours, as South Africa successfully chased Australia’s total. Their 438 smashed the previous record for the largest chase by 106 runs. The total match runs was higher than any previous match by 179 runs. The “438 match“ was quickly proclaimed by both Australian and South African press as the greatest of all time. Cricket statisticians had a field day.

In the search for reasons as to why so many runs were scored, some pointed out that the Wanderers Stadium is at an unusually high altitude for a cricket ground, 1633m above sea level. At altitude, the density of air is lower, and so there is less aerodynamic resistance to the trajectory of the ball. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the ball flies further up there. Here, I will quantify this effect.

Our model of the flight of a ball (with wind resistance) has a number of parameters: mass and radius of the ball, density of air, gravitational acceleration, drag coefficient and the initial conditions of the throw – height, speed and launch angle. The density of air varies approximately linearly with altitude in the regime in which we are interested. We will vary this parameter only.

The figure above shows how much further a ball will travel when hit at altitude, compared to a ball hit with the same initial speed at sea level. As in previous posts, the launch angle of the ball is chosen to maximize the range. in the legend is the distance the ball would have travelled at sea level. For example, at a height of 2000 m, a ball hit at 160 km/h will travel an extra 10 m, for a total of 100 m. The dotted line shows the altitude of the Wanderers Stadium.

The plot shows that a shot that would just carry the boundary at the Wanderers (about 65 m) would land about 4 metres short at sea level. This is not insignificant: a fielder expecting to take an easy catch inside the boundary line would see the ball sail over his head. While this effect alone won’t account for the 438 match, it does show that a higher altitude will help the batter.