“Why is there Something rather than Nothing, Grandpa?”

            That there is Something rather than Nothing, is possibly Necessary, if only in a philosophically rather trivial or anyhow tricky sense: If there were nothing, we wouldn’t be here to observe the nada (this is the Weak Anthropic Principle). But that there is This Something, rather than Some Other Something,  is quite possibly contingent (though the Strong Anthropic Principle would deny that).

            Take for instance the puzzling asymmetry of matter & anti-matter. It would be nice to have a principled explanation of this -- certainly we have heard special-pleading unprincipled ones --  but maybe there isn’t any.  Maybe God just got a little careless with the safety scissors that day, when he was cutting the cosmic cardboard.  He’d meant to slice it straight down the middle but --- oh well… And on to other projects. 

            (Physicists dignify this phenomenon with a poignant designator: “broken symmetry”.  Sounds so sad.  In layman’s terms, that means:  a coin-flip.)

            The concrete, particular cosmos in which we temporarily find ourselves, need no more directly or insightfully reflect the creative, ontological ultimate ground thereof, than the particular grit and consistency of the wafer, gives a hint of the Real Presence.  C.S. Lewis [and others before him? Aquinas?  References please!] compares our worm’s-eye view here below  to looking at a woven carpet from the wrong side.  There is some correlation (in all the wretched hernia-like loops and stitches) with the true pattern, but not much, and you’ll never figure out which bits give a hint and which are noise.  The force of the metaphor only grows, when you consider that reality’s carpet is not flat, but fills all of Hilbert space (at the very least; we are ignoring gravity), and with patterns not specifically tailored to the cerebral convolutions or lack thereof, of this species or that:  the human, the simian, the humble woodchuck.

            Indeed, we ourselves (for all our pathetic stupidity)  may perchance be one of the more Necessary things about it.  With so much Mind on the loose in the multiverse, it may be but natural that some of it would, so to speak, condense out here and there, into rational creatures.  We are like droplets on God’s windowpane.

            There is a popular industry of spewing out books for the general reader, focusing on black holes, or big bang, or the ill-named Theory of Everything, and deducing – well, not actually deducing anything, but sort of gasping in front of the black backdrop, then putting in a plug for God.  As though He cared more for black holes than for blackheads.  We may call this “physics porn”.

            Lately, the situation in physics has got even worse, with the dreadful possibility (and it is a possibility) of a ‘multiverse’ in any of several senses.   There has been some loose talk about “the Landscape”, as though that  were a neat discovery rather than the reduction of the reductionist program to near nullity -- and recent loose talk from Stephen Hawking to the effect that the new Phlabby Physics, as we shall call it (anything can happen anywhere, the basic constants set randomly differently in each separate universe) shows that “science makes God unnecessary”.   The danger is rather that Landscape physics will make physics unnecessary, or pointless.   As physicist Burton Richter said recently, the  Landscape approach means that physicists have “given up.  Since that is what they believe, I can’t understand why they don’t take up something else -- macramé, for example.” 

-- This just in, a useful corrective:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/01/06/world/europe/news-us-pope-bigbang.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

On this Landscape question, Hawking notwithstanding, I’ll go with the Pope.

What is particularly irksome is that these New Nihilists are attempting to dress up what is essentially an impasse in physics (see our post below, “Truth Decay”), into some new advance, that solves the old problems of Being and God.   Let us satirize the situation with a parable:

            It was observed that a certain bird, known as the Woodpecker, pecks wood.  No-one knew why this was so.  Perhaps it needs to keep its bill from getting too long, the way pet rodents will gnaw and gnaw for dental hygiene.  Perhaps it likes the sound this makes, and is attempting to stake out territory or attract a mate.  Or maybe it just hates trees.

            Scientists took two different routes to a solution.

            (1) The Naturalist, by patient observation over many years, discovered that tiny creatures live hidden beneath the bark.  By pecking, the bird can reach these and eat them.

            (2)  The Landscape Biologist, with a grand wave of the hand, explains that while, locally, Woodpeckers peck, in the next forest over, he imagines they do not, but rather roller-skate; and in the next, they play the ukele.  Problem solved.   Oh and plus -- bonus result -- there is no Creator, because who would create anything so stupid.

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Addendum:

Re broken symmetry:

Such, in effect, is Hume's fantasy, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

[continued here]

[Update]  A rather mournful meditation on the multiverse (by Alan Lightman)  here.

[Update 7 April 2012]  For the views on the subject, by physicist Lawrence Krauss, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/too-much-of-nothing-updated.html

[Update April 2014]  Jim Holt has written a whole book upon the subject.  We examine it here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/minimalism-vs-nihilism.html