Ch4 Problems

One of the criteria for a good explanation is that it has to explain some observation that someone actually cares about.  This is what allowed us to reject Russell's teapot as a bad explanation.

So to do good science you have to start with some observation that you care about that you cannot currently explain.  There is a technical term for this: it is called a *problem*.  That is not a joke.  That really is what an unexplained observation is called.  I emphasize this because you will sometimes hear people say that the existence of problems is, well, a problem.  But it's not.  Problems are an *essential component* of the scientific process.  Problems are where science starts (though it is emphatically not where it ends).  Problems are a feature, not a bug.

A problem could be anything, it's up to you to decide.  It could be something as mundane as "why are people bullying me?"  Or "Why can't I lose weight?"  Or "why am I stuck in this shit job?"  Or it good be a grand question like, "Why do I exist?  Or, for that matter, why does *anything* exist?"  (Do things actually exist, or is all this just a dream?)

Let's tackle that ultimate existential question to demonstrate how the scientific method can be applied to anything, even topics that don't appear to be very science-y.  We start with a problem, something we care about that we can't currently explain: why do we exist?  We live in a world of breathtaking intricacy.  How did it get here?  That is a perfectly legitimate question to ask.  Just by way of managing expectations, mankind has been wrestling with this question for thousands of years if not more, so we're unlikely to resolve it here, but let's take a whack at it and see how far we get.

So we have a problem.  The next step is to come up with a *hypothesis*, a candidate explanation.  Actually, what we will ultimately need is a list of all of the possible explanations we can think of, but we have to start somewhere, and at this stage int he process one place is as good as another.  One possibility is that our world was *created* by some entity for some purpose.  Let us call that hypothesis H0.

Hypothesis H0 sounds more like religion than science, but that's OK.  It is possible that the correct answer *is* religion (or at least resembles religion).  There might actually be gods and angels and demons.  At this stage in the process we can't rule anything out.

The next step is to ask whether the hypothesis is consistent with the known data.  In this case the answer is: yes.  H0 is sufficiently vague that it is compatible with a huge variety of observations.  In fact, it is hard to think of an example of an observation that is *not* compatible with H0, and that fact alone should cause us to regard it with some suspicion.  But again, the object here is not to actually arrive at the correct answer, but to illustrate the *process*.  And by way of illustration, *if* there were an observation that was *impossible* on the assumption that H0 were true, then we could confidently rule out H0 as the correct explanation.  (But, as we shall see, ruling out hypotheses on that basis will turn out to be harder than you might think.)

The next step is to ask whether H0 the *best* explanation available.  At this point the answer is yes because it is the *only* explanation!  We have not yet come up with any others, so this is not much of a victory, rather like winning the championship because no other teams showed up to the competition.  To really stretch our scientific wings we need at least one other explanation that we can compare our original to and see which one is better.

Fortunately it's not hard to improve on H0.  It suffers from an obvious weakness that I have already mentioned: it's very vague.  All it tells us is that we were created by *some* entity for *some* purpose, but it tells us nothing about the nature of that entity or that purpose.  So let's fill in some of those gaps:

Hypothesis H1: The world was created by a Creator (note the capital C), a complex entity, possibly even a deity, who created humans in its own image and with a privileged status above all other life forms, and it did this for some purpose.

That's better because it tells us *something* about the Creator: it's a complex entity, and we bear some resemblance to it, as contrasted with, say:

Hypothesis H1A: The world was created by a creator (lower-case c), an entity to whom we bear no resemblance.  The creator (with a lower-case "c") could be complex or simple, but because we bear no resemblance to it, it did not intentionally create us with a purpose.  If we have a purpose, it derives from some other source.

Let us set H1A aside for now and focus exclusively on H1, which is a substantial improvement over hypothesis H0.  It actually explains a great deal.  It explains why we humans have unique abilities among all life forms, like being able to harness the power of technology to create our own creations and mold our environment to our own ends: it's because the Creator has these abilities, and we are endowed with the same creative abilities by virtue of having been created in the image of the Creator.  It explains why we feel like our existence has a purpose: it's because it does in fact have a purpose.  Note that H1 doesn't actually tell us what that purpose *is*, only that it exists.  But that's better than not having a purpose at all, because that would bring us back to H1A and the possibility that we don't have a purpose, and now we're back to having to explain why we feel as if we do have a purpose even though we actually don't.

All this seems promising.  H1 is better than H0 (because it's more specific) but it still has an obvious shortcoming: it hypothesizes that we *have* a purpose, but it doesn't tell us what that purpose *is*.  Maybe the Creator left some clues for us?  Where might those be?  One obvious possibility is in a holy text like the Bible.  So let's update our hypothesis based on that lead:

Hypothesis G: Humans were created in the image of a deity, specifically, the deity described in the Bible, the God (with a capital G) of Abraham and Isaac.  That deity created humans for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed in the Bible.

Now we're making some real progress!  The Bible is chock-full of existential goodness.  People have been gleaning metaphysical truths (or at least what they profess to believe are metaphysical truths) from it for millennia.  Hypothesis G explains that: it is because the Bible contains divine revelations direct from the Creator, the literal Word of God.

Hypothesis G is a vast improvement over H0 and H1.  It is more specific.  It explains more observations.  It even opens up the possibility that we might be *done* because *if* the Bible really is the revealed Word of God then it's possible that it is *complete*, that it tells us *everything* we need to know, and so all we need to do is study it to find an answer to any problem.

Alas, as you might have guessed, there are a couple of flies in that ointment.  For starters, there is more than one text that could be referred to as "The Bible."  There is the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Each of these is a collection of different texts which appear to have been written by different people at different times.  So Hypothesis G is actually *two different* hypotheses hiding under the veneer of this ambiguous phrase, "The Bible."

Hypothesis J: Humans were created in the image of the God of Abraham and Isaac, who created humans for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed exclusively in the Old Testament.

Hypothesis CH: Humans were created in the image of the God of Abraham and Isaac, who is in some sense the same entity as a human known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived around 0 to 30 AD.  Jesus created humans for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed in both the old and new testament.

And, as long as we're at it, we can also throw in to the mix:

Hypothesis MO: Humans were created in the image of the God of Abraham and Isaac, who is in some sense the same entity as a human known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived around 0 to 30 AD.  Jesus created humans for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed in both the old and new testament, and the Book of Mormon.

Hypothesis CA:  Humans were created in the image of the God of Abraham and Isaac, who is in some sense the same entity as a human known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived around 0 to 30 AD.  Jesus created humans for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed in both the old and new testament, and the Apocrypha.

Hypothesis MU: Humans were created in the image of Allah, who has revealed His purpose to us in the Holy Quran via the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him.

Now things are starting to get a little messy, but it is not time to despair just yet.  It's possible that all of these holy texts aren't in conflict, that they agree on what our purpose is.  Remember, the scientific method is:

== Find the best explanation that accounts for everything you observe, and act according to that explanation until new observations or a better explanation comes along. ==

If you have two different hypotheses that both lead to the same conclusions about how you should act then it doesn't matter which one you choose.  A non-theological example of this is gravity: unless you are near the event horizon of a black hole, Newtonian mechanics and general relativity lead to the same predictions, so it doesn't matter which one you choose.

Unfortunately, in this case we do not have such an easy out because these holy texts disagree about things that ought to inform our behavior.  For example, Hypothesis MU entails that we should pray five times a day while facing Mecca, while the others do not.  We have to decide whether to pray five times a day or not, so we can't just let this slide.

Do we have any basis for preferring one of these explanations over all of the others?  Certainly not on the basis of what has been said so far.  And at this point I'm going to leave it as an exercise to see if you can think of any possibilities.  I will, however, point out two things.

First, the answer to this question matters, because there are nearly two billion Muslims in the world and over six billion non-Muslims.  If the Muslims are right, then the six-billion non-Muslims are not living up to their full potential of the purpose for which they were created.  And if the non-Muslims are right, then all of those Muslims are wasting their time praying five times a day.  And second, *if* there were an easy way to resolve this, don't you think it would have been resolved by now?  So the fact that it manifestly hasn't been resolved indicates that it is, at the very least, a significant challenge.  And doesn't *that* strike you as odd?  Why would the Creator want to make this so hard to figure out?

Finally, I promised you an answer to this puzzle: what observation can we make without the aid of any technology that cannot be explained by a flat earth?  The answer is: sunsets.  Specifically, the fact that the sun can be seen to move below the horizon at different times in different locations.  If the sun moves below the horizon on a flat earth, that has to happen at the *same time* for *all* observers on the surface of the earth, which implies that after the sun has set it must be dark simultaneously everywhere on earth.  So unless you believe that time zones are a conspiracy (in which case you are beyond my ability to help) the fact that the sun sets below the horizon, and that this does not happen everywhere at the same time, definitively eliminates the possibility that the earth is flat.