An excerpt from the powerful, uproarious & polemical The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2009) by Dr David Berlinski *
For almost as long as the physical sciences have made their claims, poets and philosophers have observed that there is something inhuman about the undertaking they represent. They are right. We gain purchase on the physical world first by stripping it to its simplest form, and second by emptying it of its emotional content. Whatever the elementary particles may be doing, they are not forming political alliances, or looking on one another with mute incoherent longing, or casting an anxious eye on the clock, or waking with a start in the early hours of the morning, wondering what it all means, or coming to realize that they are destined to fall like leaves of the trees leaving not a trace behind.
These are the things we do: It is in our nature to do them. But how do we do them? By what means accessible to the imagination does a sterile and utterly insensate physical world become the garrulous, never-ending, infinitely varied, boisterous human world? The more the physical world is studied, and the richer our grasp of its principles, the greater the gap between what it represents and what we embody.
In 1948, Kurt Gödel provided a subtle argument for the thesis that time does not exist. In the course of providing a new solution of Einstein's equations for general relativity, Gödel showed that the universe might be rotating in a void, turning serenely like a gigantic pinwheel. In a universe of this sort, each observer sees things as if he were at the center of the spinning, with the galaxies – indeed, the whole universe – rotating about him. As the galaxies rotate, they drag space and time with them, like propeller blades pulling water in their wake.
We may allow ourselves in the early twenty-first century to neglect the Red Sea and to regard with unconcern the various loaves and fishes mentioned in the New Testament. We who are heirs to the scientific tradition have been given the priceless gift of a vastly enhanced sense of the miraculous. This is something that the very greatest scientists – Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Gödel – have always known and always stressed.
We are where human beings have always been, conveyed by miracles and yet unsure of the conveyance, unable to place our confidence completely in anything, or our doubt completely in everything.
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* Watch Berlinski's presentations on YouTube, here and here.
These are the things we do: It is in our nature to do them. But how do we do them? By what means accessible to the imagination does a sterile and utterly insensate physical world become the garrulous, never-ending, infinitely varied, boisterous human world? The more the physical world is studied, and the richer our grasp of its principles, the greater the gap between what it represents and what we embody.
In 1948, Kurt Gödel provided a subtle argument for the thesis that time does not exist. In the course of providing a new solution of Einstein's equations for general relativity, Gödel showed that the universe might be rotating in a void, turning serenely like a gigantic pinwheel. In a universe of this sort, each observer sees things as if he were at the center of the spinning, with the galaxies – indeed, the whole universe – rotating about him. As the galaxies rotate, they drag space and time with them, like propeller blades pulling water in their wake.
A rotating universe turns space and time around in spirals. By moving in a large enough circle around an axis, at something approaching the speed of light, an observer might catch his own temporal tail, returning to his starting point at some time earlier than his departure.
If time moves in circles, and an observer can return to his own past, it seems to follow that effects might be their own causes.
Gödel recognized that rotating universes may be physically unrealistic, but they are possible, and once seen as possibilities, they cannot be unseen. Within these universes, time is an illusion. If time is an illusion in some universe, then features of time that we take for granted in our universe must be either accidents or gifts.
If time is an accident, it is inexplicable, and if a gift, it is unexpected. These conclusions, as Gödel remarked dryly, "can hardly be considered satisfactory."
When, in 1948, Gödel first published his thoughts, the reaction was polite, but indifferent. Einstein appreciated his friend's genius but thought his theories bizarre. But to read the literature of theoretical physics almost sixty years later is to be struck by the extent to which, at the far reaches of speculation, very similar ideas are reappearing, almost as if they were caught in one of those strange vortices that, in Gödel's view, returned things to the past. Edward Witten and Alain Connes have both speculated that in the end, space and time might not have been there in the beginning. They are not necessary features of the physical world. When the deepest theories of physics are finally set out, perhaps centuries from now, they will not mention space and time. God knows if they will mention anything that we can understand.
We live by love and longing, death and the devastation that time imposes. How did they enter into the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.
We are where human beings have always been, conveyed by miracles and yet unsure of the conveyance, unable to place our confidence completely in anything, or our doubt completely in everything.
(David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion, pp. 205-208)
* Watch Berlinski's presentations on YouTube, here and here.
