Descriptions and explanations

Lavoisier

An example will illustrate the difference between these two concepts:

• Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is considered the father of modern chemistry. His Traité Élémentaire de Chimie revolutionized many of the ideas that until then had dominated this science. However, when it comes to the chemical reactions it describes, this book is a mere catalogue. So we are told something like this:

If we mix oxygen gas and hydrogen gas and apply fire or an electric spark to the mixture, an explosion occurs and the result is water.

This is a description. It tells what happens but offers no explanation of the phenomenon.

Exploration of the solar system in science fiction

The exploration of the solar system is one of the classic themes of science fiction, although it is surpassed by the exploration of the galaxy, both in the number of works and in the variety of arguments to which it has given rise.

Among my favorite works on this subject I will cite the following:

• Exploration and colonization of the moon. Two novels that make a series: De la Terre à la Lune and Autour de la Lune by Jules Verne, whose protagonists circumambulate the moon, but are unable to land; and two short stories: The Singing Bell by Isaac Asimov and The Menace from Earth by Robert Heinlein. In the second there is a well-established base on the moon.

Richard Dawkins versus John Lennox

Richard Dawkins

At the age of fifteen I wrote my first book, with no intention of publishing, just for my personal use. It was a two-volume zoology of invertebrates. I still refer to it, although classifications have changed a lot, with the rise of cladistics and DNA analysis.

In 1977, this time with the intention of sending it to the printer, I wrote another book in English under the title Human cultures and evolution, where I proposed the following:

·         Cultural evolution is equivalent to biological evolution. Many properties are common to both fields. Human civilizations are equivalent to biological species and describe similar life curves. There is a cultural selection, equivalent to and very similar to natural selection, proposed by Darwin to explain the origin of the species.

Transhumanism, is it possible?

First, we must differentiate three different concepts:

a)   Technological singularity: the apparently exponential increase of our technological advances will tend to infinity in a very short time. By then, anything we may want to do, will be possible.

b)  Transhumanism: the amelioration of the human species by means of technology.

c)   Posthumanism: the generation of a new species as a hybrid of human beings and technology.

Possible ways of divine action

In the previous post, we saw that chaotic determinism, quantum indeterminism and free will can be considered the three vertices of a bi-dimensional triangle that, together, define the material-immaterial coordinates of the world. God in his Providence can interact with the world through the three vertices of the triangle.

• Upon the deterministic vertex, God can act by manipulating the initial conditions of the universe. For God, such conditions would not be affected by chaos theory: He would be capable of setting them to an infinite number of decimal figures. Also, the restriction of the principle of uncertainty is applicable to us, but not to the Creator. Given that God is also outside time, He would be able to use his global knowledge of the cosmos to settle the initial conditions in such a way that certain events may take place in any subsequent future. This possibility was offered by C.S. Lewis as a solution to the problem of the efficacy of prayer.

The problem of Free-Will

In the current image of the world provided by physics, we have at one side, an apparent fuzzy determinism, because the universe is chaotic; at the other end we get indeterminism. What can we say about human freedom?

Free-Will, as envisioned by classical philosophers, is incompatible with determinism. But it would be a mistake to assume that it is the same as quantum indeterminism. When a radioactive atom disintegrates, it is not free; it is subject to the influx of probability. One atom may disintegrate ten times later than another, but its longevity has not been chosen individually, it is the result of the play of blind forces which, on the average, produce the effect that one half of the atoms must disintegrate in a perfectly defined time.

Determinism or indeterminism?

Modern science has revolutionized our vision of the world. In the eighteenth century, Newton's theory of gravitation could be considered established, and gave rise to a materialistic-deterministic vision of the universe which can be personified in one of the most significant scientists of the time, Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), whose fields of study covered mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and biology. The success of his studies on the dynamics of the solar system moved him to state that, if we knew the exact initial conditions of the universe, it would be possible to predict all its past and future development. This gave rise to materialistic determinism, so successful in the nineteenth century and still a part of the popular vision of the world, in spite of the three devastating attacks it has suffered during the twentieth century.