In 1977
Pergamon Press published a curious book called The
Encyclopedia of Ignorance, which tried to collect, in a collection
of articles written by specialists in different areas, most of the problems
(then) unresolved in fields such as cosmology, astronomy, particle physics,
mathematics, evolution, ecology, biological development, medicine and
sociology. Some of these problems have not yet been solved, almost 40 years
later; others, like the mystery of the missing neutrinos in the solar
radiation, which I mentioned in the
previous post, seem to be in the way of being resolved, although this has
led to the emergence new problems, as often occurs in science.
Since the
nineteenth century, one of the typical accusations of atheists against
believers has been that they resort to the god of the gaps,
i.e. to use God to explain those things we still don’t know about the structure
of the world. We are still far from knowing everything, because science is (and
probably always will be) incomplete: there will always be mysteries.
Well, believers are accused to rely precisely on the mysteries (the gaps of science) to justify the existence
of God. According to this view, God would be nothing more than the deus ex machina of the Greco-Roman drama,
who appeared to solve the unsolvable problems where the playwright had entangled
his characters. As science advances, the holes will be filled and the need to turn
to God will get lower.
This charge
may be used against specific believers, but certainly not against everyone.
Without going further, it does not apply to me. I have never used what we do not know to justify the existence of
God. For instance, I’ve never said that science won’t be able to solve the
problem of the origin of life, because a direct intervention of God was
necessary to go from pre-life to life (in other words, that the origin of life must
have been miraculous). I have never hinted that it will be impossible to build
synthetic life (although I have said more than once that we
are very far from achieving it). I have also mentioned (in another blog)
that is likely that we won’t be able to discover how life was originated on
Earth (assuming it originated on Earth), but not because of its supposed
miraculous origin, but because all the documents (fossils) that could help us to
find it out have disappeared.
It is quite
easy to see that I’m not using the gaps of science
as evidence for God’s existence. In 2013 I published a book entitled Is
God compatible with science? where I mentioned a few cosmological arguments
that may serve as inklings of the existence of God, among them the following:
- The baffling rationality of the universe,
whose structure and cosmological evolution can be described by a few
simple equations.
- The fact that, according to the theory of
general relativity, the universe must be considered as a
physical object that needs an explanation, a cause, against the nineteenth-century
atheistic hypothesis which held that the universe is just a mental
abstraction; not being a physical object, it would not need a cause. This
argument was used by Bertrand Russell in his famous 1948 debate with
Frederik Copleston, where he took care not to mention that Einstein had
discredited his argument over 30 years earlier.
- The problem of fine tuning, by which science has noticed that
the universe seems designed for life, a question I have considered in
other posts.
The
arguments I use in my discussions about the existence of God are not the gaps
of science, those things we still don’t know, but new facts and theories, verified
and proposed by modern science.
It is
curious noticing that some scientists fall in a parallel situation to the god of the gaps when faced with unresolved mysteries
in our scientific knowledge. A few months ago I coined the term Darwin of the gaps for some of these attempts,
when it is assumed that any unsolved problem or pending mystery in the field of
biological evolution, when solved, will always be an effect of natural
selection, with a more or less farfetched explanation. I have mentioned in a
previous post one
of these unsatisfactory cases.
However,
the history of science does not always confirm these optimistic forecasts. I’ll
mention a really spectacular case, where the solution of the problem did not come
from natural selection, but from an external, totally unexpected phenomenon. In
the late seventies, when the encyclopedia of
ignorance was published, one of the outstanding problems of
science was how to explain the disappearance of the dinosaurs. There were
theories for all tastes, but some biologists kept saying that explanation, when
found, would be just another case of the action of natural selection. Among
other possibilities, the following they were proposed:
- One theory that by then had been practically
abandoned attributed the extinction of the dinosaurs to the appearance
of flowering plants (angiosperms), to which herbivorous dinosaurs
would have failed to adapt. The problem with this theory was that the change
in flora had taken place many millions of years before the extinction.
- Another very ingenious theory proposed
that the redistribution of land masses and oceans would have caused the decline
of marine phytoplankton, which in turn would have led to an
increase in the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a
greenhouse effect. The dinosaurs would not have adapted to a higher
temperature.
- It was also argued that the opening of a
communication between the Arctic and the Atlantic could have caused a change
in ocean salinity, which would have affected the marine plankton
and by rebound the dinosaurs.
 |
| Luis Walter Alvarez |
However, in
the early eighties it was discovered that the disappearance of the dinosaurs
was not directly linked to natural selection, but to an accidental event, the
impact against the Earth of an extraterrestrial body, which led to a kind of nuclear
winter and the disappearance of most vegetation, automatically causing
the extinction of all the larger species, which were left without food. It is
curious noticing that many biologists fought against this explanation (first
proposed by Luis Walter Alvarez, Nobel Prize in Physics) until the accumulation
of evidence forced them to accept it.
Nevertheless,
the
theory of gradual change refuses to die. A detailed study of the
evolution of the populations of different groups of dinosaurs during the Late
Cretaceous has been published recently. At first glance, the results are
contradictory: some groups of dinosaurs (ceratopsians and duckbill hadrosaurs)
saw a decrease in their diversity. Others (carnivore theropods, for instance)
increased it. As Derek Larson (one of the authors of the discovery) points out,
for maniraptorans things basically stayed the same through
the last 18 million years of the Cretaceous. But the media, as
usual, have given stronger headlines to the news. It must be noted in this
regard that the partial decline of the dinosaurs before the impact has been known
for decades, although not in such detail. And in the words of Michael Benton
(co-author of the discovery) this doesn’t in
any way attack the importance of the impact.
Manuel Alfonseca
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