Atheism, theism and science

Today, the world’s population is divided between two competing, irreconcilable systems: atheism and theism. They are irreconcilable, because they start from opposite fundamental axioms (God does not exist and God exists). The approximate distribution of the population is this:

• About 10% convinced atheists, willing to defend their ideas.
• 10-20% convinced theists, who try to live according to their beliefs.
• 10% agnostics, who in theory don’t accept either of the two axioms, although in practice they tend to approach one of the two opposite poles.
• 60-70% indifferent, either because they don’t care about the debate; or because they live as if God does not exist, without considering whether He exists; or because they have beliefs, but don’t let them affect their way of life.

Scientific predictions for 2020

Arthur C. Clarke

It is well known that future forecasts are all the more risky the further in time they go. Readers of my blog know that I love keeping scientific forecasts to use in the future, so as to check them when the corresponding dates arrive. Sometimes I have waited for half a century to perform these checks, which in general prove that the forecasts tend to be unsuccessful, generally due to too much optimism, although sometimes they are correct. In this previous post, I checked some of the predictions made by such distinguished popularizers as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

The three predictions I’m going to check today were made for the year 2020, with less time to go: 25 years in the first, just 10 years or a little above in the other two. Let’s look at them:

What does mathematics say about time travel?

On September 21st, an article on time travel by Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa was published in the scientific magazine Classical and Quantum Gravity. This article has been given considerable coverage by the mass media. The article argues that time travel would be possible if certain mathematical restrictions were fulfilled that would eliminate the paradoxes. In a previous post in this blog I explain those paradoxes and their different types.

In relation to this we must distinguish two different things:

1. What the article actually says: it only mentions the grandfather paradox (the time traveler who returns to the past to kill his grandfather as a child, which would make his own existence impossible), and specifies a mathematical equation that supposedly prevents it, without making the traveler's freedom of action totally impossible. The equation is this:

Illusion or ignorance?

Every civilization is blind to some things, while others are seen more clearly. This has the consequence that there are problems that a civilization strives to solve, although it is possible to show that they have no solution. This happened, for example, to the Greco-Roman civilization with the problem of squaring the circle with ruler and compass. It fell to the next civilization (ours) to show that it cannot be solved.

On the other hand, we have an evident tendency to deny the existence of what we don’t understand. This is happening to our civilization with two concepts with which we’ve got stuck, that we insist on explaining (away), but don’t have an obvious solution: the flow of time and human self-consciousness. In both cases, many thinkers of the last two centuries have said that both concepts are illusions; that they don’t really exist. Let’s look at it in more detail: