Be Suspicious When Materialists Use Metaphors or Analogies

Materialists are always using metaphors or analogies to try to spread their ideas.  The figures of speech they have used are often misleading. Frequently repeated metaphors or analogies of materialists include the following:

"DNA is a blueprint for building bodies." It would be charitable to call this  a misguided metaphor, and avoiding such charity you can simply call the claim a lie. As discussed here, DNA does not contain any specification of the anatomy of a human, and does not even specify the structure of any of the cells that make up a human body. Even the building blocks of cells (organelles) are not specified by DNA. 

"Evolution is a blind watchmaker." A watchmaker is an agent that has the intention of creating a very complex device, along with knowledge of how to create such a device. Darwinian evolution has neither any intention nor any knowledge of how to construct things it has not yet invented. So this metaphor is profoundly misleading. 

"Evolution is a tinkerer." A tinkerer is a person who engages in trial and error changes in a device, with the intention of making improvements but without a plan. The only changes a tinkerer makes are changes he thinks may make an improvement. So, for example, a tinkerer may fiddle with the dials or knobs on his furnace, but will never try something like yanking out a pipe. Lacking any intention of making improvements, and lacking any policy of "only make changes that might improve things," Darwinian evolution is not a tinkerer. 

"Your brain is a computer." Human beings are able to do mathematical operations and remember things, but the brain bears no resemblance to a computer. In the post here I discuss seven things found in computerized systems that perform fast retrieval. The brain has nothing like any of these seven things.  Trying to explain human understanding, consciousness and experience with the idea that the brain is a computer is nonsensical, because computers don't understand things, are not conscious, and do not have experiences like human experiences.

"Arising from neural activity, the mind is like the scent that rises from the bubbling soup." This is a profoundly misleading analogy. Consisting of gaseous vapor, a soup scent is a disorganized physical thing that arises from another disorganized physical thing (a soup). But the mind is not a physical thing, and things such as your memory and thoughts can be very organized.  There are very good reasons for disbelieving that the mind arises from the body, and even if it did, that would be a case of something organized arising from a physical thing that is also extremely organized (the body), not a case of something disorganized arising from something disorganized.  

"Science is like a game that has special rules."  This claim is used by people who try to argue you that the "game of science" involves special rules rather comparable to board game rules such as the Monopoly game rule that you get $200 whenever passing "Go" or the chess game rule that bishops can only move diagonally. Such persons tell us that the "game of science" involves rules such as the rule that you must always assume natural causes, that it is forbidden to admit the possibility of mysterious human powers such as ESP, that you cannot admit the possible of invisible spiritual causes, and that you can never admit that what looks so much like design in biology really is purposeful design.  There are no such rules in science. Science has always been an activity lacking any formal set of procedural rules. In law there are large texts giving written rules of procedure in federal court. No such formal rules of procedure have ever been codified for scientists. Science has always been something with loose rules, little more than basic principles such as "don't fake data" or "document observations carefully." Games such as chess and Monopoly have a formal and precise set of rules that players are supposed to follow. Science has no such codified rules. And so in theoretical physics these days there is pretty much an "anything goes" type of atmosphere where speculation runs amok. 

In a recent post a physicist (Marcelo Gleiser) gives us another example of a misleading  metaphor. Digging up a metaphor that was buried long ago, for very good reasons, the physicist describes the universe's beginning by saying "it all started with a cosmic egg." The post is entitled "The quantum egg that birthed the universe."  Cosmologists are the scientists who study the beginning of the universe and the large-scale structure of the universe. Cosmologists do not typically maintain that the universe began in some state that could ever be reasonably described as a cosmic egg. 

The theory of the Big Bang arose from observations that the universe is expanding. Tracing the history of an expanding universe back in time, going back billions of years ago, cosmologists are forced to assume greater and greater temperatures and greater and greater densities. Can they trace things back far enough to reach some point of stability, where you might postulate the existence of some stable state of matter or energy that  might have existed in a static state, before the universe's expansion began? Not at all. 

It's easy to explain why no such stable state can ever be postulated at the universe's beginning. Let's imagine the universe at some very dense and hot state, a state so hot that it was too hot for atoms to be formed. In such a state of very high density all the universe's matter and energy would have created a tremendously high force of gravity acting to cause the universe to collapse in on itself. The only thing preventing such a collapse was the universe's expansion. If you take away the expansion, you have something like what exists when a very large star runs out of its nuclear fuel, and stops burning. Astrophysicists say that at such a time the star collapses into a state of infinite density called a singularity.  The star becomes not a stable unit of matter with a specific density, but a black hole of infinite density. 

The basic description that cosmologists give of the universe's beginning is therefore not an expansion from some "cosmic egg" but an expansion from a singularity point of infinite density. The schematic diagram below shows the situation at the time of the Big Bang. Only with the expansion of the universe (shown by the black arrows) can you have something that counteracts the enormous inward force of the gravity. Stop that expansion (as in the case of some static "egg") and the inward force of gravity causes everything to very quickly crush into an infinitely dense singularity, like a collapsing very massive star that collapses to become a black hole. 

Of course, cosmologists like to speculate, and they pay their rent by churning out endless speculative models.  So there are thousands and thousands of speculative theories that cosmologists have created speculating about alternate possibilities. But the real question is: what the does the basic data generically suggest? What it suggests is a universe suddenly beginning to expand from a point of infinite density and temperature. 

Such a point cannot be reasonably described as a "cosmic egg." An egg is a stable structure which has within it complex arrangements of matter. Analyzing the proteins in an egg, we would find many complex arrangements of amino acids that have to be just-right to allow the egg to be the starting point of an organism. No such organized arrangement of matter could exist at some earliest state of the universe, which would be no more comparable to an egg than the beginning of a hydrogen bomb explosion would be like an egg. Of course, you could evoke the metaphor of some carefully constructed hydrogen bomb as being the "egg" of an H-bomb explosion. But that would be the careful design at the beginning that materialists such as Gleiser wish to avoid. 

In the paper "Did the Universe Have a Beginning" by Tufts University scientists Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, the authors describe several speculative scenarios, one of which they call the scenario of an "emergent universe."  They describe this speculative scenario like this: "This universe can be thought of as a 'cosmic egg' that exists forever until it breaks open to produce an expanding universe."  At the end of the paper we have a short section entitled "Did the Universe Have a Beginning?" The authors give this as their answer to the question of their paper title:

"At this point, it seems that the answer to this question is probably yes. Here we have addressed three scenarios which seemed to offer a way to avoid a beginning, and have found that none of them can actually be eternal in the past. Both eternal inflation and cyclic universe scenarios have H_av > 0, which means that they must be past-geodesically incomplete. We have also examined a simple emergent universe model, and concluded that it cannot escape quantum collapse. Even considering more general emergent universe models, there do not seem to be any matter sources that admit solutions that are immune to collapse." 

It seems that there could not have existed any "cosmic egg" at the beginning, because such a thing would have been too prone to the kind of collapse the paper refers to, something comparable to what happens when a very massive star very quickly undergoes a gravitational collapse to become a black hole. Gleiser's assertion that "it all started with a cosmic egg" is not a correct description of the Big Bang, and such language is not typically used by today's scientists who study the Big Bang.  

Another way in which materialists try to avoid a beginning of the universe is by theories of a cyclical universe. There is the theory that the universe's current expansion is only one of an infinite series of cycles, each consisting of an expansion of the universe (lasting billions of years) followed by a contraction of the universe (lasting billions of years). In his 2021 paper "Three Impossible Theories," the well-known physicist Leonard Susskind mentions why such an idea of an oscillating universe does not work, referring to the second law of thermodynamics:

"Besides being very bizarre this behavior violates the second law. The eternal oscillations constitute a perpetual motion machine of the third kind, whereas the second law requires the oscillations to eventually dissipate and the system to come to thermal equilibrium."

The idea of a universe that had existed forever was long a pillar of materialist thought. Early in the work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius,  the principle surviving work of ancient materialism,  he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock tenet of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation. Nowadays materialists have to resort to something much flimsier than the notion of an eternally existing universe: the word trick used by Gleiser of using the misleading term "egg" to try to plant in our minds the physically untenable idea of some egg that existed a while or maybe forever before exploding.  They're not candid enough to say: "We don't understand how we get such a lovely universe out of nothing."